A319
Flight Crew Air Transport Pilot (ATP)
Fatigue
Other Fatigue
Company Policy; Human Factors
Our domicile now has red eye or red eye plus one or two legs on all their scheduled lines of flying. Regardless of seniority you will be stuck with cross clock flipping of rest times and red eye flying. I do not do well on the back side of the clock as I find it difficult to sleep midday. Flight duty began at XA15 and ended at XE59. This flight began on time; operated on time and had no issues. I however got more and more tired as the flight went on. I was making mistakes; missing radio frequencies; late to call for checklists etc. By the time we got on the ground I was tired; hungry and very irritable. I flew a trip last week that also had sleep cycle changes in it and even after getting home and having six days to recover; my sleep cycle is now so messed up that on any given night's rest I may get two or three hours of sleep--or a nice full eight hours. I don't know how to fix it or regulate it. I just try to sleep all night when on days off. Sometimes I do; sometimes I don't. Even shift workers stay on one end or the other of the clock. Although licensed dispatchers are required to work 10 hours in a day. I doubt they flop back and forth with shift time changes. Commercial truck drivers are allowed 12 hours. Pilots are allowed 16 hours of duty and anyone who thinks a duty day of 16 hours with a flight day of say 4; or 5 hours is an easy day; is sorely mistaken. Work is work; and starting at XA15 one day and then starting at XH00 on another is not a normal sleep pattern. Sleeping during the night works well; or sleeping during the day; but changing it back and forth within a four day trip is not in the best interest of proper rest or safety.The company should not schedule humans to start one day of work at XA15; and then follow it up with XF10. Here is how that works in real life. I fly from XA15 to XE59. I sleep for 3 hours; wake up at XJ30 local domicile time. Then I am supposed to also sleep again sometime this same day to operate a trip at XF10 local domicile time. I already slept part of this day and now I am supposed to tell my body to magically go to sleep again and sleep for 8 hours. Schedules should keep the clock either on a day time or night time schedule.
An A319 Captain expressed her concerns for the safety impact of her company's flight crew scheduling patterns which force pilots to work on alternating body clock cycles within a single given sequence of flights.