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June 3, 2016
See the secret airplane bedrooms where flight attendants sleep on long-haul flights
Posted by gerardvanderleun at June 3, 2016 1:03 PM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.
Your Say
In my meatspace life, I am one of those pilots who use these sleep facilities. I frequently fly from the West Coast to Tokyo. The westbound flights are 12-ish hours long and the eastbound flights are 10:30 or so.
We use these sleep facilities based on some rather-arcane rest rules. Depending on the length of the flight, time of day, and where we last slept (what we call "acclimatized"), we need to rest at some point in the flight. There really is some science behind it....the central idea is to get the pilot who is going to land an opportunity to get a nap during the time when he most needs it (which we call the "Window of Circadian Low").
On shorter flights, there might be 3-pilots, in which case, one guy rests at a time. On longer flights, there are 4-pilots, and two rest at a time. On some of the longer flights, we break up the rest breaks into short breaks and long breaks....just depends on how the crew wants to operate.
Posted by: azlibertarian at June 3, 2016 10:11 PM
Flying the L1049 in the '50s, we kept it simple. On long flights, it was two on/two off. i.e. one pilot flew for two hours and one rested, then we switched. We did have a flight engineer on the flight deck to help keep the active pilot awake. The luxurious crew bunks were behind a curtain across from the navigator's station, where he invariably had some kind of loud music going on the ADF, and just abeam the #2 R3350, soundproofed by .050" of aluminum skin.
Posted by: BillH at June 4, 2016 6:52 AM