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From: ladkin@kestrel.ARPA (Peter Ladkin)
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: Re: Sleeping
Message-ID: <5901@kestrel.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 17-Mar-86 16:42:49 EST
Article-I.D.: kestrel.5901
Posted: Mon Mar 17 16:42:49 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 19-Mar-86 04:42:55 EST
References: <519@hoptoad.uucp> <130@sfsup.UUCP> <498@tekig5.UUCP> <1971@hao.UUCP> <2026@peora.UUCP>
Organization: Kestrel Institute, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 27

In article <2026@peora.UUCP>, jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) writes:
> 
> It has indeed been shown that people deprived of sleep don't show any 
> massive degradation in their abilities to perform certain tasks, but 
> there are other factors involved too:

Not in the case of aviation .. see below.

> [..]  People tend to stay 
> awake if kept awake by situations that require them to remain alert;

In the sense of "not passing out", I agree, but only in this sense.

The National Transportation Safety Board reports on each aviation
accident within their jurisdiction. A significant number of 
accidents attributed to pilot error correlate with lack of rest.
Even really experienced pilots (10,000+ hours) have made mistakes
that are hard to believe.
From my own experience, flying precision and non-precision
approaches on instruments (no outside visibility), the
degradation of performance under stress induced by lack of
rest is quite noticeable.
Pilots do indeed show considerable degradation in performance
with lack of rest.
If anyone's interested, I can send some references.

Peter Ladkin