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NaturalNews exclusive: UNITED-Continental airline pilots forced to fly with as little as 3 hours' sleep, 'worked until we drop'

Sunday, August 12, 2012
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)
Tags: Continental airlines, pilot fatigue, sleep deprivation

Continental airlines

(NaturalNews) Whistleblower pilots flying for United / Continental airlines warn that they are being "worked until we drop," forced to pilot consecutive long-distance flights with as little as three hours' sleep. In a series of secret meetings with NaturalNews, three United / Continental pilots described the "utter hell" they are being put through:

"We are being worked until we drop," one pilot to me in a recent face-to-face meeting in Texas. "United-Continental is flying us in violation of FAA legal requirements. Pilot fatigue is at red alert levels. This is an accident waiting to happen."

The FAA requires pilots to have at least 8 hours of rest in any given 24-hour period. From the FAA's website:

...a pilot is not allowed to accept, nor is an airline allowed to assign, a flight if the pilot has not has at least eight continuous hours of rest during the 24-hour period. In other words, the pilot needs to be able to look back in any preceding 24-hour period and find that he/she has had an opportunity for at least eight hours of rest. If a pilot's actual rest is less than nine hours in the 24-hour period, the next rest period must be lengthened to provide for the appropriate compensatory rest.

But NaturalNews was told that United-Continental is operating in blatant violation of this rule. One pilot explained to me, in detail:

"The airline often schedules us with only nine hours of time from arrival of one flight to the departure of the next. They claim this is supposed to give us nine hours of rest, but on a recent turnaround in [city withheld for privacy], our flight had more handicapped customers than was recorded in the manifest, and we had to wait for more wheelchairs to arrive, which took an extra 45 minutes. Then we were over an hour on transportation to the hotel, and another hour for check-in and getting to the room. I had exactly 2 hours and 49 minutes of sleep before I was required to get up, shower, dress, check out, get back on the transportation van, get through the airport, and back on the flight deck for preflight. I then flew a long-duration trans-continental flight, managed to catch six hours of sleep after that, and was piloting yet another flight."

The cost of pilot fatigue: Injury, death and lost planes

The cost of pilot fatigue can be catastrophic. Earlier this year, an Air Canada pilot awoke from an in-flight nap disoriented. He thought the planet Venus (which can appear as a bright "star" on the horizon) was an approaching plane, so he nose-dived the airliner to avoid what he thought was a potential collision.

The result? A 400-foot altitude plunge, 7 people in the hospital and 16 injured passengers and crew. As reported in the DailyMail: (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2130...)

Jon Lee, chief investigator, said the incident shows the problems airline crews face when dealing with being sleepy. He said: 'This occurrence underscores the challenge of managing fatigue on the flight deck.'

Pilots have even died from fatigue, even while piloting flights carrying hundreds of passengers.

Did pilot fatigue kill Continental pilot Craig Lenell?

"One of our own had a heart attack and died a few weeks ago, in-flight," the United-Continental pilots told me. The story checks out. The pilot's name was Craig Lenell. He was described as being in "perfect health" and was piloting a Boeing 777 from Brussels to Newark. As Fox News reports:

Lenell died of a suspected heart attack midway through Continental Airlines Flight 61 on Thursday. Two co-pilots took over the controls. Passengers didn't know anything was wrong until they landed and were met by fire trucks, emergency vehicles and dozens of clamoring reporters. (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,527465,0...)

"If something doesn't change soon, you're going to see more pilots dying in-flight," I was told. "Or worse, you're going to see a fatal mistake, and 150-plus customers could be falling out of the sky."

Pilot fatigue is even more critical when flying into difficult airports. Many airports served by United and Continental are surrounded by volcanoes and mountains. Localized weather patterns and storm cells make navigation very complex, even for experienced pilots. "The way we're being flown with these lapses in sleep, it's only a matter of time before we lose a flight," one of the pilots told me. "[United / Continental] is rolling the dice with the lives of its customers."

Pilot fatigue being pushed to its limits by airline company management

United-Continental is currently in a back-wages battle with its pilots. I was told that pilots have had their pensions stolen by the company. They're owed back-wages dating back several years, the pilots told me, and the company is refusing to pay. As a result, pilots are staging a "work slowdown" that has caused the airline's on-time flight record to plummet in recent months.

Over 1,400 pilots have been laid off by the company (http://crewroom.alpa.org/ual/DesktopModules/...), even at a time when remaining pilots are being stretched so thin that they're often flying in a sleep-deprived state.

"Retired Continental Airline pilots alleged that Continental had breached the retirees' pension plan by improperly calculating their salaries when determining their pension benefits," reports Corporate Financial Weekly Digest (http://www.corporatefinancialweeklydigest.co...). "The retirees received an adverse ruling from the System Board, and, as they were expressly permitted to do both by the CBA and the System Board's decision, commenced an action in federal court under ERISA challenging the ruling. The federal district court for the Southern District of Texas dismissed the action for lack of subject matter jurisdiction and the Fifth Circuit affirmed.."

The pilots got screwed, in other words. Their pensions have been raided, looted by the usual suspects. This, on top of the insane sleep schedules being forced upon the pilots, is a recipe for disaster.

Bottom line? Don't fly United / Continental until the pilots get paid and well-rested

Personally, I won't fly United-Continental until I get word that their pilots are having their pensions restored and sleep requirements honored. To get on an airplane piloted by a sleepy-headed, angry pilot being screwed over by the company he works for is not my idea of a safe flight experience.

Although pilots are among the most psychologically balanced people in any profession (they undergo routine psych evaluations and physical exams), even they have a breaking point. What the airline is doing to these pilots amounts to a type of work torture. Sleep deprivation, after all, is a commonly-practiced torture technique. While not all the pilots are sleep-deprived on all flights, getting on one of these airplanes right now is a bit of a "Russian roulette" game in that you have no idea which pilot is awake and alert versus which pilot is suffering from dangerous sleep deprivation.

Steer clear of United-Continental until further notice.

And to the management of United-Continental, remember this: The pilots make or break an airline. If you piss off the pilots, they will drive your company into the dirt. If you keep the pilots happy, they will deliver a remarkable record of on-time flights, efficient turnarounds and happy experiences for customers. And as a bonus, they won't accidentally fly your precious hardware into a mountain or scatter passengers across a field somewhere, which is always a messy scene with lots of TV news coverage.

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About the author:Mike Adams (aka the "Health Ranger") is a best selling author (#1 best selling science book on Amazon.com) and a globally recognized scientific researcher in clean foods. He serves as the founding editor of NaturalNews.com and the lab science director of an internationally accredited (ISO 17025) analytical laboratory known as CWC Labs. There, he was awarded a Certificate of Excellence for achieving extremely high accuracy in the analysis of toxic elements in unknown water samples using ICP-MS instrumentation. Adams is also highly proficient in running liquid chromatography, ion chromatography and mass spectrometry time-of-flight analytical instrumentation.

Adams is a person of color whose ancestors include Africans and Native American Indians. He's also of Native American heritage, which he credits as inspiring his "Health Ranger" passion for protecting life and nature against the destruction caused by chemicals, heavy metals and other forms of pollution.

Adams is the founder and publisher of the open source science journal Natural Science Journal, the author of numerous peer-reviewed science papers published by the journal, and the author of the world's first book that published ICP-MS heavy metals analysis results for foods, dietary supplements, pet food, spices and fast food. The book is entitled Food Forensics and is published by BenBella Books.

In his laboratory research, Adams has made numerous food safety breakthroughs such as revealing rice protein products imported from Asia to be contaminated with toxic heavy metals like lead, cadmium and tungsten. Adams was the first food science researcher to document high levels of tungsten in superfoods. He also discovered over 11 ppm lead in imported mangosteen powder, and led an industry-wide voluntary agreement to limit heavy metals in rice protein products.

In addition to his lab work, Adams is also the (non-paid) executive director of the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center (CWC), an organization that redirects 100% of its donations receipts to grant programs that teach children and women how to grow their own food or vastly improve their nutrition. Through the non-profit CWC, Adams also launched Nutrition Rescue, a program that donates essential vitamins to people in need. Click here to see some of the CWC success stories.

With a background in science and software technology, Adams is the original founder of the email newsletter technology company known as Arial Software. Using his technical experience combined with his love for natural health, Adams developed and deployed the content management system currently driving NaturalNews.com. He also engineered the high-level statistical algorithms that power SCIENCE.naturalnews.com, a massive research resource featuring over 10 million scientific studies.

Adams is well known for his incredibly popular consumer activism video blowing the lid on fake blueberries used throughout the food supply. He has also exposed "strange fibers" found in Chicken McNuggets, fake academic credentials of so-called health "gurus," dangerous "detox" products imported as battery acid and sold for oral consumption, fake acai berry scams, the California raw milk raids, the vaccine research fraud revealed by industry whistleblowers and many other topics.

Adams has also helped defend the rights of home gardeners and protect the medical freedom rights of parents. Adams is widely recognized to have made a remarkable global impact on issues like GMOs, vaccines, nutrition therapies, human consciousness.

In addition to his activism, Adams is an accomplished musician who has released over a dozen popular songs covering a variety of activism topics.

Click here to read a more detailed bio on Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, at HealthRanger.com.

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