Narrative:

I am nearly exclusively a night flyer due to my years of flying this type of schedule. As a result; I typically am a night-owl; and will not go to sleep until about 1 to 2 am eastern time regardless of when I arrive in my hotel while on a trip. A trip pairing had me deadheading on a flight which pushed at xx:40. My hotel lobby time to go to the airport required me to be downstairs at xx:15. The hotel did not have any food available; so I knew I would have to set my alarm to to get breakfast and coffee to start my day allowing me enough time to uber to a local diner to eat; return; shower and pack. Waking; I noticed I had been assigned additional flying on my board; which would have given me a 10 hour duty day and asked me to lobby the following day for another very early show for a am trip. While the overnights were technically legal; the scheduling of these types of changes ignore the reality of circadian rhythms which take time and consistency to change. Facing a 10-hour day on five hours sleep was not realistic. The change to my schedule would have it repeated the next day with a required wake up of X am.we need to maintain uniformity with respect to pm and am scheduling; both can have their extremes; and it is for those extremes that our respective sleep cycles are built. For example the flying on the am side that results in landing past X am on the pm side. In my example there was a later flight that left at X:40pm that I could have deadheaded on which would have put me into ZZZ without fatigue. There was no need to interrupt my sleep to deadhead me into ZZZ; especially given the abundance of pilots on reserve in ZZZ. My report is because this is not the first time I have encountered this issue with respect to changing night flying into morning flying. Moving up a pilot into a schedule where they are normally still asleep places a large amount of fatigue stress and is just not safe. Do our schedulers receive the same training on fatigue that we do? And if they do not; it should become mandatory.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: Air Carrier pilot reported the airline schedulers routinely schedule pilots from night flights to morning flights which causes pilot fatigue.

Narrative: I am nearly exclusively a night flyer due to my years of flying this type of schedule. As a result; I typically am a night-owl; and will not go to sleep until about 1 to 2 AM Eastern Time regardless of when I arrive in my hotel while on a trip. A trip pairing had me deadheading on a flight which pushed at XX:40. My hotel Lobby time to go to the airport required me to be downstairs at XX:15. The Hotel did not have any food available; so I knew I would have to set my alarm to to get breakfast and coffee to start my day allowing me enough time to UBER to a local diner to eat; return; shower and pack. Waking; I noticed I had been assigned additional flying on my board; which would have given me a 10 hour duty day and asked me to lobby the following day for another very early show for a AM trip. While the overnights were technically legal; the scheduling of these types of changes ignore the reality of Circadian Rhythms which take time and consistency to change. Facing a 10-hour day on five hours sleep was not realistic. The change to my schedule would have it repeated the next day with a required wake up of X AM.We need to maintain uniformity with respect to PM and AM scheduling; both can have their extremes; and it is for those extremes that our respective sleep cycles are built. For example the flying on the AM side that results in landing past X AM on the PM side. In my example there was a later flight that left at X:40pm that I could have deadheaded on which would have put me into ZZZ without fatigue. There was no need to interrupt my sleep to deadhead me into ZZZ; especially given the abundance of Pilots on Reserve in ZZZ. My report is because this is not the first time I have encountered this issue with respect to changing night flying into morning flying. Moving up a pilot into a schedule where they are normally still asleep places a large amount of fatigue Stress and is just not safe. Do our Schedulers receive the same training on fatigue that we do? And if they do not; it should become mandatory.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.