Interesting differences Deano. In the US we have no total Duty limits butwe are limited to 14 hours scheduled but it can be extended out to 16 hours for wx and mx. Flight time limits are 8 hours scheduled per duty period, 30 hours in a rolling 7 days, 100 hours per month and 1000 hours per year. International operations have slightly different hour limits. The 8 hours scheduled isn’t a limitation once you’ve begun your day. They saying is “legal to start, legal to finish” which means if you have delays you can fly as many hours as it takes to finish the flights as long as you don’t exceed your duty day limit. My record is 10 hours in 1 duty period thanks to thunderstorms and diversons.

Rest requirements are that we must get 8 hours between duty periods. Most airline pilot groups have negotiated slightly improved rules but not much. Our min rest is 9 hours but we can be scheduled for 8 hours if we are given 11 hours of compensitory rest during our next rest period. Nothing like the promise of future rest to make you feel better now. 😉

There are also continuous duty nights as well which go by many names depending on the company (standup overnights, illegals, etc.). Where the “rest period” is less than 8 hours so it isn’t considered a legal rest period so the whole night you are considered “on duty”. This is legal as long as you aren’t scheduled more than 14 hours of total duty time. You fly to the overnight, go to the hotel and grab a nap for a few hours and return to fly home. It’s been years since I’ve done them but I do remember quite clearly that they are absolutely miserable.

But I don’t like the reasoning: close to 100hrs a month => fatigue. That conclusion is drawn in that article.

I don’t think any conclusions were stated in the article, only outlining the legal and company flight time limits per month.

You can have 100 duty hours a month without having 14 hrs a day. Actually, if they fly 10 block hours with 20 hour off in between, it is 5 trips a month.

The limit is 100 FLIGHT hours, not duty hours, an important distinction. A crew can take a several hour delay for maintenance or weather before even pushing off the gate to start their flight. Every hour of delay on the ground extends there duty day while the flight time will remain unchanged.

There is difference between total flight time per month vs. duty time. I probably do 30-35 hours of duty a week for 20-23 hours of flight time per week. My duty time for the month is over 120 hours while the flight time is <100 hours.

As all people survived there is plenty of possibility to find out if crew was deprived of sleep. So I guess we’ll wait for the report to tell if the crew did remain
– within legal limits
– within commonly acceptable human limits (which I would consider at least 10 hours, preferably 12 hours between two shifts)[/QUOTE]

I can hardly believe fatigue is reason for someone to mess up his take-off speed calculation. If you fly an aircraft and have some experience, you should have a “mind-map” of take-off speeds and thrust settings (FLEX correction). You wouldn’t necessarily guess it, but some numbers might look suspicious.

In the A340-500 case the crew tried to take-off with very limited thrust under full load on a hot day. That is not fatigue, that seems to be lack of airmanship.

Fatigue can do amazing things. CFIT’s are a perfect example. No pilot would intentionally fly their airplane into the ground. If something as severe as that can happen due to fatigue a simple error in button pushing is nothing.

So lets be sceptical for a moment. Lets say it’s possible that the sparks came from maybe something on the wing mechanics or one of the gears, maybe it was something to do with the flap motors and so the flaps weren’t extended enough and hense the long unexpected take-off because something happened after V1.

Might be cltching at straws here but just a thought to give the claims some credability.

The aircraft would have to be pretty significantly banked to strike portion of the wing or engine. As for something else sparking on the wing or in an area that would have been visible from inside the aircraft I can’t think of anything other than possibly something with an engine. I’m sure any damage in addition to the tailstrike would have also been reported and none was.

Having spent sometime in the middle seat of a widebody I leery of any eyewitness from that vantage point. It’s hard to see the window from that far away let alone describe what’s happening on the other side of it. Plus if something as dramatic as sparks flying passed windows 20-30″ forward of the tail strike I pretty sure we would have eyewitness reports from someone actually sitting at a window. Stuff like that is prime for any media report of such an event. None have surfaced except from someone sitting in the worst possible vantage point.

It’s pretty common to have language in the FOM that limits employees to wearing their uniforms to and from work only. It’s unwritten but I’d believe most managements would give employees some leeway so not to punish someone for dropping their kids off at school or something similar in uniform. The intent of the rule is to prevent someone from actively doing something non-work related in uniform (ie shopping). Why AirTran went after this pilot is odd. How did they find out he was there and how did it get into the news? There might be more to the story.

You weren’t even sitting by the window and saw them? Where were these sparks coming from that they would be visible especially if you weren’t sitting at the window? You weren’t even in the last row but the last 10-15 rows? You saw the sparks before you even felt the strike?

How in the world did were any sparks even as far up as that on the airplane? Do you have any idea how far rearward the tail skidplate is located from where you were actually sitting? Even an exploding engine doesn’t throw fire forward, only aft.

None of this is matching up. I’m thinking you saw light from something non-related and associated it with the tailstrike.

Maybe I’m being thick, but I still don’t understand how anyone could see sparks trailing at high speed backwards and underneath the tail of the aircraft.

I’m with you on this. I’m sure passengers heard/felt the tail strike but seeing a shower of sparks? I raise my BS flag on that one.