Indonesia is investigating how two pilots fell asleep during a flight

Indonesia’s aviation authority said it would investigate how the country’s airlines operate night flights after both pilots of a Batik Air flight carrying 153 passengers fell asleep, causing the plane to briefly veer off course.

The flight – a journey of about three hours from Kendari to Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, early January 25 – was a return trip for the crew and the plane, which had spent less than an hour on the ground after arriving from Jakarta.

The plane took off from Kendari around 8 a.m. and after reaching cruising altitude, the captain took a nap while the co-pilot manned the flight, according to a preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Committee. After about an hour, the co-pilot accidentally fell asleep, and several panicked calls from the air traffic control center and other aircraft went unanswered.

About 28 minutes later, the pilot woke up, realized the plane had gone off course and woke the co-pilot. They corrected course and the plane landed safely in Jakarta.

Batik Air is owned by Lion Air Group, Indonesia’s largest airline, which has a problematic safety record. In 2018, one of the flights fell from the sky shortly after takeoff, killing all 189 people on board. In 2013, a Lion Air flight crashed into the sea while trying to land; all passengers were safely evacuated. And in 2004, 25 people were killed in a Lion Air crash in Surakarta, Indonesia.

In recent years, Lion Air Group has made significant investments in improving the safety of its flights, said Gerry Soejatman, an Indonesian aviation expert and consultant, but he added that it was unclear whether the investments addressed underlying problems or provided quick fixes made possible.

“Because they have a questionable history,” he said, “what we worry about is that they are too desperate to solve the problem.”

Indonesia’s aviation industry has had “a bit of a turbulent history,” said Keith Tonkin, director of Aviation Projects, an aviation consultancy in Brisbane, Australia. Indonesian airlines were banned from flying in the United States and the European Union for years after a series of Indonesian airline crashes in 2007. The bans were lifted in the United States in 2016 and in the European Union in 2018.

The preliminary report for the Batik Air episode revealed that the 28-year-old co-pilot, who was not named, had not slept well the night before the flight because he had one-month-old twins and “woke up several times had to be’. time to help his wife take care of the babies.”

While preparing for the first leg of the return flight, he told the 32-year-old captain that he had not slept well and, at the captain’s offer, had taken a 30-minute nap during the flight from Jakarta to Kendari, it said report. .

The report shows that while Batik Air instructs its pilots on limitations to look out for before a flight, including stress and fatigue, it does not provide detailed guidance on how pilots can assess these limitations. “The lack of detailed guidelines and procedures may have prevented pilots from properly assessing their physical and mental status,” the report said.

It also found that while Batik Air specifies that the aircraft’s cockpit should be checked every 30 minutes during a flight, it does not specify who is responsible for the checks and how they should be carried out. Cockpit checks are usually performed by flight attendants.

On Saturday, Indonesia’s director-general of civil aviation at the Ministry of Transport, Maria Kristi Endah Murni, said the ministry would investigate the Batik Air episode and assess how all the country’s airlines are dealing with crew fatigue while operating night flights.

Batik Air said in a statement that both pilots involved in the flight had been temporarily suspended.

The problem of crew fatigue at airlines around the world has been exacerbated by pilot shortages due to the coronavirus pandemic, Mr Tonkin said. With many airline workers laid off during the pandemic and not yet returning to the industry, “there is systematic pressure on everyone in the industry to perform at a very high level, with limitations,” he said.