#220 FFA Probe Helicopter EMS Pilot that fell asleep during flight

Day 220, coffee with Kenny. And I'm gonna be blunt and honest and transparent, not be politically correct in this video. This is about fatigue. And I'm drinking a coffee right now because I'm tired as. And the reason I'm tired is I just got back from that trip from California. I'm having trouble adjusting, been having trouble getting to sleep, trouble getting back up in the daytime. And I got myself in a mess. And that's just from traveling right. And the time zone change and being gone 11 days. FAA launches probe into helicopter pilot that fell asleep with the controls okay, this is a very short little tidbit of an article. Some of you may already know about this. Maybe not. Federal Aviation Administration officials are investigating a former Boston Med flight pilot who allegedly fell asleep during a flight to Boston Hospital. According to ABC News, the pilot missed a designated helipad when transporting a patient from Martha's Vineyard to a Boston Hospital on June 24. FAA officials believe that the pilot fell asleep with the controls. Boston Med flight CEO, blah, blah, blah, said that the fatigue likely played a factor and the transport was completed without further incident. Boston Med flight no longer employs the pilot and the company is working with a fatigue management consultant to ensure this doesn't happen again. Huh, Imagine that. Probably something that should have already been handled. And I'm not going to speculate exactly. This pilot, don't know who he is, nor do I care. Doesn't matter. This is about fatigue and I just want to talk honestly about it a little bit and I'm going to pick on EMS a little bit first, but then this applies to any one of us. Brand new student, when you're learning. Actually, let's start there. You know, when you're first taking lessons, man, it takes a lot out of you and it takes a lot of anybody, right? You're learning a new skill, you're trying to learn the knowledge, you're trying to learn these muscle movements and flat out, hands down, I can tell you if you're tired, you're not going to do as well on a well rested night. You're going to learn better, you're going to perform better. That's just the way it is. I have one example of a guy who flew three times a week. He was a steelworker, big guy, worked hard. He'd come in two nights a week after work and his flight sucked. He'd come in on Saturday morning after a good night of sleep and all fresh and clean and ready to go. And he'd always have a good Lesson, whether we're brand new or we're commercial pilot, we're EMS pilot. Fatigue plays a factor, right? And so what can we do? Number one is trying to get the proper amount of sleep. Okay? We all know how to do that by this point, right? If you're flying helicopters, you're most likely adult at this point. There are some young kids out there flying, but basically, we ourselves have to be the ones to make sure that we have proper sleep. Now, there's going to be those times when you're going to fly when you haven't had the proper amount of sleep. And there's those times when you're going to fly when you are tired. And I know over the years what I tried to do is just if I knew, if I was tired, I tried to really tell myself that, right? And say, man, I got to be on my toes because I'm tired. And maybe you're in a position where you could call flights off because you're tired. Maybe not. Let's go to the EMS area for just a little bit. You know, there's this national attention on helicopter crashes this year across the board, for everybody. EMS helicopter crashes have been a problem for years, and we're approaching another record year. Okay? We have the helicopter pilot shortage that everybody says is a bunch of bullshit, and that's not true. There is a pilot shortage, especially in the EMS field. They cannot fill the jobs. Okay, so what happens? Bases are short. I lived this for five years that I did it. And I'm telling you, we were always short. I worked at two different bases. You're always short because there's always somebody that's probably just recently left. You're trying to hire a new pilot, so you're trying to find backup pilots within the company to come up and fill in. So you're supposed to work seven days on, seven days off. When you do that, it's great, right? When you get to do that, you're always. Not always, but a majority of the time, you're short pilots. So when they're short, if there's no backup pilots, what happens? You get to fill in on your days off. So your 7 and 7, you know, could turn into more days off, more days on, less days off. Right? And the company I worked for switched every other time. You know, a week of nights, a week off, a week of days, back and forth, back and forth. And I remember a manager telling me, oh, well, we think the arcadium cycle, you know, one week is enough to change, you know, to flip you from One side to the other. I call bullshit. I don't care. I've worked nights off and on for years. Law enforcement, fire department, my towing service. I've worked the most irregular, stupid, crazy freaking hours as anybody out there. And when your sleep is disrupted, you're going to always be tired and you can never make up for lost sleep. And let's talk about the working nights for just a minute. Let's say you've got your seven nights on and then you're short of pilot, so you're going to work 10 nights straight, 11 nights straight, 12 nights straight. You know, you're supposed to get off in the morning, go home and try to get some rest. What happens to people that work night shift? Those of you that do you know exactly what happens? The rest of the world continues on when you're trying to home sleep in the daytime. And I've heard jokes and many of you have seen articles on this. And the world doesn't stop just because you're on night shift. And even your friends and family will call you up at 10am oh, what are you doing? Sleeping? Yeah, I work nights. Why in the eff are you calling me? I work nights. What do you think I'm doing at 10 o' clock in the morning? So you got the phone ringing or you got somebody banging on your door or you've got that appointment that you can't miss. It is so freaking hard working nights to get the proper amount of sleep. And then working nights. A lot of EMS jobs you can sleep okay, it's allowed to sleep. But here again, how tired are you? And then you are sleeping in the middle of the night and you get that call. You got to be in the air in 10 minutes. So you got to come out of asleep, check weather, get the information for the flight, see where you're going, do all this stuff, pull the helicopter out and be in the air in 10 minutes. And if you're not in the air in 10 minutes, you're having to write up a description to your base, why it is it took you to get off the ground for more than 10 minutes. Do you see where I'm going with this? I don't know what the answer is. I just want to say that, you know, fatigue plays such a big part of it. And over the years of my training in my different jobs, you know, I've understood what it's like flying tired. You're not as good, you don't make as good a decisions and it's just harder to make decision decisions. And I can tell you it really came out to me once they trained us with night vision goggles. To me that was the time I noticed it more than any time. You know when you start getting tired and there's something about, you know, looking through the night vision goggles. It's just like if you were tired, it really brought that out in your eyes and you could just feel it, you just knew it. And again, I don't know what happened in this one and I don't want to, and I don't want to say because I don't know wasn't there, they didn't give us the information. I just want to bring up the whole fatigue topic and I guess just say, you know, as pilots, student pilots, private pilots, commercial pilots, whatever it is you're doing across the board, pilot wise, sleep is so freaking important. I've been flying 20 years and I can tell you when you're tired, you just don't make good decisions or not as good. You don't see things, you miss things. When you're flying tired, you're just not as good, you're just not and you're never going to be. So I want to put that out there, put some thought process in it. I'd love to hear some of your feedback about, oh, this, you know, new article that's out or anything you want to mention along with the sleep factor. I just want to make the point that when you're tired, it just ain't going to be good. Not as good as when you're well rested. And it's up to us to try to get the proper amount of sleep. Do our best and take this into consideration. When you're making your go no go decisions, sometimes you're going to be in a job where you're going to feel pressured. Sometimes you can just call the flight off because it was a for fun flight. Or maybe you work for a company who's very conservative and there are companies out there. So let me give credit to every company that's very conservative with their pilots and say, look, if you don't, if you just don't even feel good, don't even go. And the company I worked for, EMS for five years, they even said it can be a bright sunny day. If there's something inside your gut, is this telling you not to take a flight, turn it on, turn it down and we'll back you up. Which sounds great in theory, but you still got to deal with the wrath of the people. You're turning the flight down at some hospital somewhere that's the customer and it's the middle of a beautiful day and you're turning the flight down. Do you think they're going to complain? Oh yeah, they are. So you know, those problems in the EMS industry are probably not going to go away anytime soon. I'm sure there's you know, some new programs going on. They're probably making some new develops to try to make it safer. But I think the FAA launching a probe into helicopter pilot fell asleep with the controls. I think that's probably a good idea. And for this company to work with the fatigue management consultant to ensure that this doesn't happen again. I think that's a pretty damn good idea as well. Day 220 Coffee with Kenny like I said, I'm tired as but all I'm doing is making a video. At the worst I could just mess up my words look stupid. But this point, after 10 years of making videos, I kind of got over the worry of looking stupid because I look stupid every day. I'm alright with that. Do us a favor like subscribe to the channel, give us your feedback down below. When you subscribe, click that little bell to be notified of the daily video and we'll see you in Day 221 Coffee with Kenny get some sleep. I'm going to try. I'm going to do my.