Come this January 4th, your commercial airline pilot operating under Part 121, me, will be flying under newly implemented rest rules. Created two years ago and finally being put into play, these rest rules allow for a STRICT, non reducible, 10 hrs of rest with a mandatory 8 hrs for sleep opportunity. With today's rules, I sometimes can find myself down to 6 from a given overnight time of 8 hrs and that's a good night. Unfortunately, there have been less in rare instances but I never deemed myself unfit to fly. Have I called out fatigued before, yes. I wrote a small PDF document that I included in a post over four years ago and if you never checked it out, here the link again. I also did a "Part 2" which you should check out as well.

But anyways, here's a great post of how it'll affect you, the flying public. Who knows how it'll really play out, but airlines have been gearing up for this in the last few months. Some have even said that it could cost them more than $25 million annually!

So what does this mean to you? Well, don't go and travel on bad weather days especially in the afternoon. Fly in the mornings. In the afternoon or night on bad weather days at large airports, there will be flight crews all timed out being sent to hotels at airports they weren't supposed to be at in the first place and planes and passengers stuck there until morning or until they get another crew in place.

Here's a link to the actual new FAA Final Rule and ALPA comparative literature on the difference between the current and pending rest rules.