While savvy travelers are always on the prowl for cheap airplane tickets and cheap vacation packages, just about everyone agrees that safety must remain priority one. With that in mind, congressmen are demanding that the Transportation Secretary write new rules to prevent pilot fatigue, as he promised last year after a plane crash near Buffalo, New York, that killed 50 people.
Last June, the Transportation Secretary and the Federal Aviation Administrator convened a special committee that included airlines and pilots unions to propose new regulations concerning pilot fatigue. The committee delivered its recommendations to the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) in September.
The Federal Aviation Administrator promised that the FAA would draft its own proposal and publish it prior to the end of 2009. Since then the deadline has been pushed back repeatedly.
The FAA submitted a draft proposal to the Transportation Department in February for review. If accepted, the draft must then be reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget. At present the FAA is targeting September 14th as the release date for the new rule.
Unfortunately, even after the rule is published, it could be months or years, if ever, before the proposed rule is implemented. The National Transportation Safety Board has been calling for the FAA to update pilot flight and duty time rules for the past 20 years.
The FAA proposed new rules in the 1990s, but they were never finalized because the FAA could never get the airlines and pilots unions to agree on the changes.
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