The Indian Air Force is facing a curious problem these days – being online for long hours on social media is causing sleep deprivation in pilots. This was observed by none other than the IAF chief, B.S. Dhanoa, who said this at the 57th annual conference of the Indian Society of Aerospace Medicine in Bengaluru on Friday.
Dhanoa said some mechanism must be developed to ensure that the pilots are flight ready.
“Earlier, if a pilot had one drink too many, the barman would know. Even if the barman didn’t know, other people knew about it and the pilot would be laid off flying for the day. Today we even have breath analysers for that,” Dhanoa said. “But the problem now because of social media is sleep deprivation. There must be a check mechanism by which we should be able to make out that a person is not fit enough to get in the cockpit,” he added. He said sleep deprivation “is a new challenge for us”.
Dhanoa said that this could be dangerous. In 2013, a fatal air crash took place because the pilot was sleep deprived. “We had an unfortunate fatal air crash near Rajasthan’s Barmer in 2013 that resulted because of continuous sleep deprivation for a number of days,” Dhanoa said.
