A Month in the Life of Commercial Airline Pilots: Part 1

by Ray Oyung

January 22, 2004

Have you ever wondered what all those pilots are doing in the front of the airplane while we’re riding safely in the passenger cabin either eating, watching a movie, working, or talking with the people seated next to us?

Well, our group is not interested in just what those pilots are doing during the flight, but also what they’re doing after the flight. And we’re not only interested in what they’re doing before, during and after just one flight, but we are interested in a whole month of flight activity. Back and forth these pilots fly. Some of them are flying many short flights (some of the flights are as short as 8 minutes long). Could you imagine a flight that takes less time from take off to landing than the time needed to taxi the airplane to and from the airport terminal? Well, those flights do exist. Try taking a flight from the George Bush Intercontinental Airport to the William P. Hobby Airport the next time you visit Houston.

Also, we’re interested in the pilots who fly the long routes across the oceans to Asia, Europe, and towards Australia. Those flights can be quite long (up to 16 hours to some destinations depending on the location of the jet stream and which way the airplane is moving). Just off hand, do you know what a jet stream is? If you do, then that’s great! Could you explain it to me now? I had to look it up to refresh my memory. Looks like another fellow NASA Quest member was wondering the very same thing, but related to space shuttle launches. Here’s a link for more information: http://quest.nasa.gov/qna/questions/Earth_Rotation_Flight_Time.htm

So to get back to our story, we decided to join a group of willing pilots on a month-long trek of their everyday lives to determine how much sleep they were getting each night (or day) before, during and after their flights. We didn’t join them physically. I doubt they would want to be with someone they barely know all day, every day for a month. We wouldn’t get many volunteers that way. So we programmed a little activity monitor the size of a small watch that measures movement. The device is worn on the wrist just like a watch. When the pilots are working or doing their daily choirs (they have to brush their teeth and clean their rooms too) the activity monitor will measure their movement. When they sleep, there’s less movement and over time we can see their sleep and wake activity patterns collected by the device when we download the data onto a computer. What we see is a bunch of squiggly lines. But these aren’t any ordinary squiggly lines. After the entire month, we’ll have an idea of when the pilots are going to bed, when they wake up, how long the pilots are sleeping, and also to a certain extent how well they are sleeping.

The squiggly lines of sleep and wake activity. Each row of data output represents 24 hours. Black marks across each row represent varying activity levels (see - this is what it looks like when you're cleaning your room) and the periods of very little activity may be analyzed for sleep.

Click on chart to see full sized

This information about how well pilots are sleeping will help us determine how to help them increase safety when they’re on the job. Now we can’t get all the information we need with just the information we collect from the activity monitor. So we programmed a little hand-held electronic organizer that has a series of questions that the pilots answer throughout the day. With all this information, we have a better, more accurate idea of when the pilots are going to bed, getting out of bed, working, eating, and so on. By having two forms of information we can have a better chance of obtaining accurate information.

I’ll tell you more about what we discovered in the next article so stay tuned!

And by the way, today is the beginning of the Year of the Monkey so happy new year to you all!