Fatigue plays a large part in complacency. Dave will share a personal story about a time when his fatigue led to a mistake.
“One thing that can lead to complacency is fatigue. I remember the first Gulf War back in 1990 to 1991. It started with an operation called Desert Shield, which was designed primarily to fortify areas of the Middle East to prevent any further aggression by the Iraqis who had just invaded and overrun their neighboring country Kuwait. Later on when the fighting started the operation was called Desert Storm.
“For flight crews, Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm involved 24 hour workdays, very long workdays. We would normally fly to Europe and the next day we would fly to a destination, usually somewhere in the Middle East. It took about 4 hours to get the airplane refueled, checked out, and airborne, and another 7 or 8 hours to get down and arranged to the Middle Eastern destination. Then another 4 hours or so for people to remove the cargo and refuel the airplane. Then we fly another 8 or 9 hours to get back to Europe, so once again, it's a very long day.
“I remember after one of those 24 hour workdays, I was the aircraft commander, we landed back in Europe, in the middle of the night. After a long successful day, starting to relax, I taxied into a parking spot and we prepared to shut down the engines. Here’s where I got ahead of my copilot and I read off the first three items on the after landing checklist from memory. ‘Brake switch emergency parking brake set. Scanner set to depart airplane.’ The scanner was one of the flight engineers who would monitor the engine shutdowns while standing outside the airplane near the front of the airplane. I just said those things from memory. The copilot didn’t actually place the brake switch into the emergency position, he was still looking for his checklist and I went ahead and got ahead of him. A minute later when the flight engineer performed a hydraulics check, all the hydraulics systems were turned off and we didn’t have any brakes, and the airplane started to roll. The scanner outside fortunately said ‘You're rolling!’ The flight engineer gave us back the hydraulics system, and the airplane stops on a dime.
“The point here is I got ahead of my checklist after a long successful day, and I got a little bit too relaxed. The moral is, you just can’t let your guard down until all your engines are shut down and you’re off the airplane. And that's a mistake I never made again.”
For the full audio podcast, listen to “Complacency in Flight,” on our front page and linked below.
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