How do airline pilots stay alert during red-eye flights? Well, unfortunately they sometimes don’t, as indicated by several recent planes veering, and even crashing, due to pilot fatigue.

The New York Times’ Matthew Wald reports that the Federal Aviation Administration’s National Transportation Safety Board, a purely advisory agency, is looking at what can be done about pilots who fly planes without having slept in the last 15-20 hours. The issue has been visited before: in 1995 the FAA proposed a series of rules about pilot flight times but never instituted them.

With FAA facing all types of scrutiny, now might be a good time to tackle an obvious, but sometimes disastrous, problem.

– Matt Blake

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