CANBERRA, Jan. 23 (Xinhua) -- One quarter of Australia's pilots get less than five hours'sleep before long-haul commercial flights, a survey has found.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau on Wednesday released the results of a survey of 625 domestic, international, charter and aeromedical pilots.
It found that while the majority of pilots were getting sufficient rest, those that were not were more likely to be operating flights longer than eight hours.
Despite processes existing for pilots to take time off due to fatigue, a majority said they felt uncomfortable doing so.
Half of all domestic and international flights reported getting less rest on the job than at home while 15 percent of international pilots said they got no rest at all during their most recent flight.
The ATSB report noted that "responsibility to manage the risk of fatigue lies with both the individual pilot and organisation."
"The results of this research suggest that operating in circumstances conducive to fatigue is an ongoing challenge for a proportion of Australian air transport pilots," it said.
The results were published ahead of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority finalizing its new fatigue risk management rules.
"When you've got 30 percent of long-haul pilots reporting less than 12 hours of sleep in 48 hours, that's quite a sleep debt you're building up," Shane Loney, a safety and technical director at the Australian and International Pilots Association, told News Corp Australia on Wednesday.
"It demonstrates to CASA this is real. It's not something dreamt up by pilots out of some industrial gambit."
Loney said that if he was involved in the survey he would have asked pilots if they had ever unintentionally fallen asleep during a flight.
"I've seen that asked live to a group of 250 to 300 pilots and it is almost shocking when you see how many people put their hand up," he said.
"What is worse is the odd occasion when you have two pilots who have unintentionally fallen asleep.
"It happens a lot more often than we'd like to imagine."
