Fighting Pilot Fatigue on Military Charter Flights

Captain Craig Gatch’s marathon flight schedule, which took him through 36 time zones in 11 days, finally caught up with him as he touched down in Baltimore on May 6, 2009. He was piloting 168 U.S. soldiers home from Iraq when his World Airways Boeing DC-10 bounced off the runway, then slammed down again, damaging the jet beyond repair, according to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. One person was severely injured. Gatch told investigators he hadn’t slept well in four days while flying more than halfway around the world—fatigue that contributed to the accident, the safety board ruled.

Not enough military planes and pilots to transport U.S. troops means that 87 percent of personnel flown around the globe are carried by civilian charter airlines, a $4.5 billion-a-year business critical to the nation’s war efforts. The pilots who fly for World and other smaller military-charter companies work under U.S. rules that permit extended hours with less time between flights than commercial airlines or the military’s own guidelines allow. This puts the pilots and the troops at risk, says Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va. “Our soldiers may be expected to be heroes on the battlefield,” Voss says, “but we shouldn’t be relying on heroism flying them back home again.”