A very bad way to wake up

[drdoug]

The story of the sleepy Air Canada pilot who "mistook Venus for an oncoming aircraft and put the plane into a steep dive" has been doing the rounds. A relatively reasonable version of the story is on the Toronto Globe and Mail, but as ever with these things, you can't beat the actual investigative report - and the Canadian Transportation Safety

Comments

[mistdog]

Wear your seatbelt when flying. All the time. Double-check it if the 'fasten seatbelts' sign comes on

That's the cabin crew's job, and they clearly weren't doing it on this flight. Every time the fasten seatbelt lights comes on, the cabin crew check that everyone has their seatbelt on, even in business class, and usually lock the toilets. They routinelywake people up if they are asleep and the seatbelt isn't visible - on Virgin they advise you to fasten your seatbelt over your blanket to avoid this. I myself have been woken up in this situation because the seatbelt was covered by a fold in my blanket and they couldn't see it, and I've heard them waking other people up for this countless times, even in business (where, I agree, the seatbelts are much more comfortable - there's far more slack). So if anyone was injured, it sounds like it wasn't just the captain not following procedure.

[drdoug]

A good point, yes.

(Worth noting that the 'fasten seatbelts' sign was illuminated for a broadly-unrelated issue (predicted turbulence), though.)

[haggis]

Interesting. And the most applicable bit for me is the bit about sleep inertia. I've wondered why I sometimes feel HORRIBLE when I wake up after a nap in the day or early evening and it's clearly that I've slept a bit too long and reached the sleep inertia stage.

Also, I also have a geeky love of safety reports. My final exam at university (Chemical Engineering) was Safety, which was basically a mixture of disconnected technical bits (flammable limits, effects of explosions) and fascinating/horrifying examples of "why doing the same thing 1000s of times without incident doesn't make it safe" (that example was shovelling fertiliser with metal shovels) or "make sure that signal really says what you think it does" (Three Mile Island) but the most tragic one was "safeguards will only work if you maintain them", which is Bhopal where safeguard after safeguard failed because the sensors were broken or out of service.

[drdoug]

Safety reports are great