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Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va., said he's hopeful that the attention generated by the recent sleeping incidents will cause the FAA to change its policies to allow controllers working at night to take extended nap breaks that can help them stay more alert when they go back to their tasks. That's something sleep scientists have long recommended and many other countries already permit. "Before this recent public discussion, this was such a political nonstarter there was no one in the FAA who would even mention this publicly," Voss said. "Now an opening has been created to maybe do what they knew was the right thing along." He pointed to the crash of a regional airliner near Buffalo, N.Y., two years ago that killed 50 people. The accident renewed concern about fatigue-causing pilot schedules, especially at regional airlines. As a result, the FAA is in the process of changing its regulations governing pilot work schedules. "It's great we are managing to do this one without the body count," Voss said of controller schedules. But Mary Schiavo, a former Transportation Department inspector general, said sanctioned napping is still a nonstarter. "I just don't think Americans are going to buy that," she said. "If you come to work for an eight-hour day, you ought to be able to stay awake for it." Schiavo also objected to putting two controllers on duty in airports when traffic is light. "There are lots of places we need controllers more than on the graveyard shift where might be four flights the whole shift," Schiavo said. "We need those controllers (at facilities) where we have had the highest number of operational errors. We need those controllers at the busiest sectors." In the 12 months ending on Sept. 30, 2010, the FAA recorded 1,889 operation errors
-- which usually means aircraft coming too close together. That was nearly double the 947 such errors the year before and 1,008 the year before that. Before 2008 the FAA used a different counting method. It is the job of controllers to keep aircraft separated. Very few of the errors fall into the most serious category, which could result in pilots taking evasive action to prevent an accident. But those instances have also increased. In the year ending Sept. 30, there were 44 such events; 37 in the prior year and 28 in the year before that. Babbitt has said the increase in known errors is due to better reporting, including technology the FAA has adopted that can determine more precisely how close planes are in the air.
[Associated
Press;
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