Navy Carrier Sailors to Get More Rest Under New Policy
Sailors aboard the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush watch as a tugboat approaches the fantail to assist in a return to homeport earlier this year. (Navy)
Sailors assigned to aircraft carriers will now get mandated amounts of rest time each day thanks to a policy change by Naval Air Forces.
Recent reforms to the NATOPS General Flight and Operating Instructions Manual mean that non-aviation personnel will be guaranteed eight hours of uninterrupted sleep daily.
They also will no longer be regularly scheduled for more than 18 hours of continuous duty, according to the command.
If a mission or job requires such a long stint, sailors will be afforded at least 15 hours of off time before resuming their duties.
While sleep regulations already exist for the aviation crews, the new policy reflects fears about fatigue dogging the surface force. Concerns about the lack of rest for those sailors were highlighted by official probes in the wake of the deadly collisions last year involving the guided-missile destroyers Fitzgerald and John S. McCain.
Military investigators noted that crew fatigue hikes the risk of accidents.
Thank you Captain Obvious. Naval Aircrew have had similar crew rest requirements for exactly that reason, for a very long time. It’s long overdue for embarked ship’s company as well. The entire article may be viewed at The Navy Times
Category: Navy
Trust me, I’ll:
1. Pull out
2. Won’t unload millions of babies and turn your mouth into a daycare center.
3. Never bang your sister even if she’s hotter than you
4. Be gentle, I know it’s your first time, just breathe and relax, it won’t hurt and no we don’t need lube
5. Never show anyone the naked photos I took of you.
Chip, RE Item 3:
Does that make her mom fair game?
Asking for a friend.
If her sister is hot, that usually came from her mother. So, hell yes!
We turned too around 7 or 8 AM till 4PM then you were on your own unless you were standing watch. Underway was the same.
Damn airdales always were “mama’s favorites”, where was this when we were 4 on and 4 off in the boiler room? Where were the ear plugs for black shoes. like the airdales got? Thats why I have hearing aids today!
On one of my old ships we engine room snipes stood 6 and 6’s. That sounds good, except for Un-reps, Vert-reps, drills and plane guarding. On most days you would get 3 to 4 hours of sleep. Thats not in a row either, thats sleep in a catch as catch can mode.
Longest I ever did was a stretch of 45 straight days of that 6 and 6, one even gets sorta used to that schedule after awhile.
Long overdue, IMO. No one is immune to fatigue and/or sleep deprivation, or their effects. At some point, your decision making ability and judgement simply turn to crap.
One of the best examples of that was related to me by a young Signal lieutenant one day. It occurred while he was the Communications Officer for a combat arms battalion, and during an ARTEP Eval (big deal during the early 1980s) the Battalion Commander sent for him.
“This damn radio won’t work! LT, get it working – now!”
“Yes, sir.” (Looks at radio, checks cables, does something else. Conducts commo check.)
“OK, sir, it’s working now.”
“Damn! Lieutenant, what the hell did you do?!”
“Sir, you really don’t want to know.”
“Dammnit, Lieutenant, tell me! That’s an order!”
“Sir . . . I turned it on.”
Turns out the Battalion Commander had been up roughly 2 days straight at that point and was getting punchy. He’d literally been trying to communicate with a radio that was turned off.
Fatigue may or may not “make cowards of us all”, as the old saying goes. But it damn sure can turn a wise man into a blithering idiot.
I had a commander launch an attack 12 hours before Brigade LD time at NTC because he had been up for three days straight. I kept asking him if he was sure he wanted to do it until he was ready to relieve me. The OCs had a field day with him after most of the unit got waxed before the battle started.
I was at JRTC for my first rotation and there was one battalion in our Bde that decided they were going to work 24 hours a day before they even went into the BOX. So the rest of us are all taking it easy, getting plenty of sleep at night and this one Bn staff had people falling out before we even left the airport. It was just ridiculous.
The really good thing was, they made so many mistakes and screwed up so bad, our battalion looked even better than it already was.
Some leaders think that not getting any sleep makes you better and even more hard core. All it does is show how utterly stupid you are and that someone else needs to step up and take your job.
When you can go easy, you go really easy so that when you really need to be hard core and get shit done, you are at least rested up to make sound decisions.
BT;DT
The Navy tought me that if I work long enough, there comes a time when I shouldn’t be touching equipment, because I start making stupid mistakes that make my day even longer. They also taught me roughly the number of those long days in a row that it takes for me to burn out and start looking forward to leave.
Yeah, preventing those sounds like a good idea for everybody.
I remember a friend who was in the Navy telling me he once worked a 20 hour day, took a brief break for a snack and then went back to work, climbing a radar mast to do some repairs/troubleshooting. I’m amazed he or anyone else in such a situation elsewhere in the fleet didn’t end up causing massive casualties to machinery/equipment or getting themselves killed.
Maybe I am way out of line, but with the number of personnel onboard how were they never able to effectively rotate sailors off deck for a good rest period? It boggled me at times. I understand that in times of combat operations that may be difficult to do, if not impossible…
The mind can’t comprehend when the body can’t endure. Sometimes the only answer is a long, well deserved nap. With cookies and ice cream.
N3A…Nukes Need Not Apply.
Amen brother. Plant drills were usual between 2200 and 0600 depending on flight ops. The primary purpose of the bird farm is to fly birds. Shifting plant configurations, maintenance, and training always worked around flights ops. Only exception was ORSE. They got their beauty sleep.
Damn, you beat me to it. First thing that popped into my head when I saw the headline. Remember many nights of taking steam out of one of the boxes to do maintenance and have it back up in time for the next flight cycle. Nothing says fun like working on a steam valve that’s still 400 degrees.
N3A came to my mind also. Up at 0330 for the 0400-0800 watch, workday until 1600, watch from 1645-2000, meetings and daily reports in the Engineering Logroom from 2000 until 2130 or so, casualty drills 2200 to 2400, weaponeers cycling hydraulics for 2 hours from 0000-0230 in the magazine each night right forward of berthing, back up a 0300… Rinse, repeat. No nucs in berthing areas between 0600 and 1600 (no late sleepers regardless of reason). That’s only if you were lucky enough to be on a 4×8 rotation. 4×4 was a bit different. Ahh, iron ships, wooden men.
Doesn’t NATOPS mean “not applicable to our present situation”?
Also- Navy’s Attempt To Operate Planes Safely.
Naval Air Training and Operating Procedures Standardization states that it is “…not a substitute for common sense.”
So tell THAT to the Accident Review Board. Me? I’d love to help but I’m on crew rest.
Ah, NATOPS! The Big Blue Sleeping Pill! Sure cure for insomnia.
“Naval Aircrew have had similar crew rest requirements for exactly that reason, for a very long time.” When I was flying with VQ-1 etc., crew rest only applied to “flight essential” crew (cockpit, radar op, navigator, radio op IIRC). The rest of us schlemiels were used and abused to death. I remember one mission series when we were putting in 20 hour days for five days straight. 10.0 missions and 10 hour postflights. Yuck! After four days my brain literally shut off in the middle of a sentence. The MC was sitting next to me and noticed that and poked me. I started up where I left off! Ha! Another time we were grinding again and hit our 120 hour limit in less than a month and had to get cleared by the flight surgeon. At one point, she came out and was just shooting the shit with the O-gangers. She said that she could always tell when an aircrewman needed a down chit. Their pulse was elevated. Well, I was next in line and when I got in there, she took my pulse. 120 bpm. Resting. “So, how do you feel?” Of course I said fine. “Okay, here’s your up chit.” Sheesh! That is when I REALLY started losing respect for flight surgeons. Another time our PH had an ear infection so bad that when he went uphill in a car he was screaming in agony. Agony. The flight surgeon said he could fly cause it was just a transit and he wasn’t flight essential. Asshole. One more and I’ll get off my soapbox. I was deathly ill. Went to see the doc cause I had lost 36 pounds in ONE WEEK (!!!!) and could only walk about 10 feet before I had to sit down. My blood work was all fucked up. Anyway, I was sked to go on deployment from Hawaii to Japan and long story short, he gave me a fucking upchit even after I told him my history! Two days later, the night before the transit to Misawa, I ended up in the ER with… Read more »
GW-1 we lost an excellent In-Flight Ordie exactly that way. Ruptured ear drum, down chit for life. Sucks.
Another flight with PAX onboard, a young Marine stopped me after climb-out, said he couldn’t clear his ears. Out comes my completely illegal squirt bottle of Afrin- and couple shots up the schnozz and a couple sticks of gum and he was good to go. I still reported his distress and took him to the Flight Station for monitoring during descent. He was fine when we landed.
Don’t hesitate…SELF-MEDICATE!
Most Squadron Flight Deck Trouble-Shooters work flight ops. That means from the moment Flight Quarters is called away or the 1MC until flight ops secured that evening, those guys in the white jerseys and checkerboard patterns on their float coats were on deck ensuring aircraft could leave the pointy end of the ship.
What’s fun about that is setting the alerts after. When we got done with our 18 hour “day” we got to shower and sleep on the floor of the shop in case they moved the alerts up to 15 minutes. Only to do the same the next day.
Can I get it all back … retro-like?
We had nothing like this.
MCPO OUT
They tried it in the mid-90’s on my last boat. CO even went so far as to say everyone in the duty section had to have 5 hours sleep in port.
Of course, that had to work around maintenance, cleaning, watch, training. Absolutely nobody took it seriously, let alone followed it. Just another box to be checked.
LMAO!
Bring in port is crazier and busier than being at sea!
I was never PCS’d to a ship, but I made plenty of TAD trips and many of my PCS’d shipmates told me they were fucking relieved when they got underway. No more 5 million things pulling you in different directions.
“All I have to do is my job.”
The way I see it, this is a just a good “thinking out of the box” FITREP bullet. Kind of like TQL, it will simply die a quiet death.
Or if someone got nailed asleep or nodding off on watch, the command would pull their “directive” out of their ass and say, “Well, this policy ensures you should have had enough sleep!” despite their being fucking fully aware nobody followed it.
The Army has been conducting experiments in sleep deprivation for years. The Navy occasionally send folks over to try out the experiment. They mostly conduct the experiment over a few months at some infantry bases like Fort Benning, GA, and some place up in the mountains of north Georgia called Dahlonega, and a place in the Florida panhandle called Camp Rudder. They used to also conduct it in parts of west Texas, or Utah, or New Mexico but the Army determined people don’t get tired of the desert, and no war would ever be fought in a desert so they discontinued that part of the test…maybe you have heard of it? They call it the United States Army Ranger School!
I’m glad that they’re finally getting around to implementing this crew rest policy in NATOPS. Everyone needs to be as alert and as vigilant as possible at all times while working in the extremely hazardous environment on the flight deck, and it’s difficult to maintain that level of constant 360 degree awareness when one is exhausted.
When things go wrong during shipboard flight operations, they tend to go wrong very quickly indeed:
‘US Navy helicopter crashes on USS Ronald Reagan flight deck, sailors hurt’
https://www.foxnews.com/world/us-navy-helicopter-crashes-on-uss-ronald-reagan-flight-deck-sailors-hurt
‘A U.S. Navy MH-60 Seahawk crashed shortly after takeoff on Friday while conducting routine operations in the Philippine Sea, the Navy’s 7th Fleet said. It was not immediately clear how many sailors were injured, but they were in stable condition.
The Ronald Reagan Strike Group was performing routine operations off the Philippine coast around 9 a.m. when the helicopter made an emergency landing and crashed on the ship’s flight deck, the service said.
“All injured personnel are in stable condition under evaluation by Ronald Reagan medical staff,” the Navy said in the statement obtained by Fox News. “While some personnel will be medically evacuated ashore, none of the injuries is life-threatening.”
There were two pilots and two crew members aboard the helicopter, officials told Fox News. Their injuries ranged from minor cuts to broken bones.
Details on whether the helicopter or aircraft carrier sustained damage were not provided. The Navy said the ship remains fully mission capable and has resumed flight maneuvers.
The cause of the crash was under investigation.
This is the first known crash of a Navy helicopter in the Pacific since April last year, when a MH-60 crashed after takeoff from a destroyer near Guam.
Last year, two warships from 7th fleet were involved in separate collisions at sea killing 17 American sailors.
In August 2017, the USS John McCain collided with a merchant vessel near Singapore, killing 10 Navy sailors.
Two months earlier, seven American sailors were killed when the USS Fitzgerald struck a Philippines-flagged cargo ship off the coast of Japan.’
But, but, but, we are always being told how good the Navy has it with the best chow and almost never getting shot at (until or unless the bear or the dragon go to sea; well the USS Cole)???
You mean sailors have it tough too, sometimes?
Nonsense. Aviation Class A mishaps outpace ship Class A’s every year. I think they need to dig a bit deeper than crew rest to find the causal factors. But it is Navy Safety so……