San Francisco, California Personal Injury Blog

Federal safety regulators believe that requiring truckers to have electronic onboard recorders will help prevent truck accidents. The premise is that an EOBR will discourage truckers from falsifying paper logs to conceal violations of safety rules - especially hours-of-service rules designed to keep fatigued drivers from causing crashes.

California truck accident attorneys and many other safety advocates support the EOBR effort.

The trucking industry has resisted the EOBR requirement, however, claiming that is invasion of truck drivers' privacy. The Owner Operator Independent Drivers' Association (OOIDA) challenged the requirement in court and won a preliminary ruling.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is currently working on redrafting the rule so that there will be greater protections for drivers' privacy.

FMCSA is holding "listening sessions" this spring to allow truck drivers and others in the trucking industry to express their views about EOBRs.

Many trucking officials have said that the electronic recorders can be an effective management tool. Trucking companies that are ethical and responsible can use them to monitor trucker hours and respect when the EOBR shows that a driver is out of hours for a given time period.

No one denies that a drowsy pilot is more apt to make mistakes and cause an accident. But should the same rules on pilot fatigue that apply to passenger flights also apply to cargo flights?

Pilot errors due to excessive tiredness can occur on any type of flight. That's why many cargo pilots believe that the new federal rules on rest for pilots on passenger flights should be extended to cargo flights.

A member of Congress, Rep. Chip Cravaack of Minnesota, has introduced a bell in the House to force federal safety regulators to apply the same pilot fatigue rules to cargo pilots as to passenger pilots. Cravaack is a former cargo pilot and says there is a need for a single safety standard. Pilots groups tend to agree.

Starting in January 2014, federal rules will limit flying by passenger pilots to eight or nine hours, depending on the time the flight started. There will also be 10-hour minimum rest periods, allowing for eight uninterrupted hours of sleep.

The timing couldn't be worse. When you've been hurt and need to make important decisions about your medical care, a traumatic brain injury can make it more difficult to make good decisions.

Brain injuries are very challenging in that respect. And research is increasingly showing just how extensive those challenges are when head damage is involved.

In a research study published last month, scientists examined the effect of TBI on an injured person's ability to make complex decisions. The team of researchers from the University of Alabama - Birmingham examined 86 patients with traumatic brain injury.

The researchers divided the patients into three groups, based on the degree of brain injury. One group was categorized as suffering mild impairment. The other two groups were complicated mild and moderate / severe. There were also 40 healthy people in a control group.

The research team tested each group on medical decision-making capacity using a standard measure. The measure contained components that reflected the elements needed for a patient to consent to treatment, including expression of choice, reasonableness of choice and appreciation of potential risks and benefits.

It takes time for federal safety investigators to complete an inquiry into a plane crash or other aviation accident.

California aviation accident attorneys have come to expect this. The National Transportation Safety Board moves at its own pace to perform a thorough investigation.

As a case in point on the timing of NTSB investigations, consider the fatal collision between two planes last month near Longmont, Colorado, about 30 miles from downtown Denver. The fatal crash occurred on May 23, when two planes collided in clear sides near the Longmont airport.

Both people in one of the planes were killed. One was a 30-year-old instructor pilot. The other was a 64-year-old student pilot. The plane was a single-engine Cessna.

The pilot of the other plane survived. She was 72 years old and also flying a single-engine Cessna.

The plane whose pilots died came down near two homes in a Longmont neighborhood. A person who saw it described the crumpled plane as "like a smashed beer can."

The NTSB did not take long to issue a preliminary report on the crash. This preliminary report outlined the basic events. But it did not express any opinions on the likely causes of the crash.

Aviation is a highly collaborative enterprise. From parts makers and pilots to maintenance crews and traffic controllers, there are a lot of players involved - even with small aircraft.

An aviation accident can result, however, if there is a breakdown in safety anywhere along the line of responsibility.

Peter Goelz, a former top official at the National Transportation Safety Board, put it very well. "Everybody's got a responsibility for safety," said the former managing director of the NTSB.

Goelz made this statement in the context of an initiative called cockpit resource management, also known as CRM. He was referring to a recent incident in which a JetBlue co-pilot locked the pilot out of the cockpit after the pilot began acting erratically.

Traditionally, the airline industry was very hierarchical, with the lead pilot at the top of the pyramid. Increasingly, however, the industry is realizing that safety requires a common commitment among everyone involved with a flight.

In high-school sports, teenagers can get knocked around a lot no matter the sport. Traditionally, if a young person took a hard hit it was expected he or she would recover from the injury quickly because of being young. That can no longer be said of teenagers and brain injuries.

When it comes to concussions and other catastrophic injuries to the head, teenagers are no more resilient than adults. According to a recent study that tested the thinking of teenagers after concussions, the brains of teenagers are just as susceptible to brain injuries as adults and perhaps more so.

The study, conducted by the University of Montreal, looked at the influence brain injuries had on three different age groups: children, teens and adults. All age groups demonstrated issues with working memory after sport concussions but researchers were surprised by the findings about teenagers because of long-held beliefs. The brains of teenagers were found to be affected six to eight months after injury. Particularly, the working memory of teenagers was found to be affected.

When does reliance on technology become excessive, so that safety suffers because manual skills have eroded so much? Or stunted the development of those skills in the first place.

The tipping point may have arrived, when it comes to commercial airliners.

Airplane design defects are usually thought of as very specific flaws. But what about the design and installation of so many gadgets on planes that a counterproductive point of "automation dependency" impacts pilots' ability to fly safely.

To be sure, automated tools and systems help pilots do many things in the cockpit. In a sense, it's almost like having a third pilot. Auto-pilot controls can also enable planes to achieve greater fuel efficiency, by staying at a constant speed.

Experts are increasingly concerned, however, that automation has advanced so far that is has made pilots overly dependent on auto-pilot and other technical tools.

After all, technology is not infallible. In fact, it can often provide false information to pilots and discourage the use of human judgment. In a number of foreign countries, airlines have revised their pilot training in order to strengthen manual flying skills.

Concerns about driver fatigue in truck drivers are well documented. Federal safety regulators recently revised the hours-of-service rules in an effort to reduce driver fatigue - and thereby prevent truck accidents.

What isn't as well known is that fatigue is also a major problem for pilots. Pilot errors take many forms, but many of them are due to not getting enough sleep.

A new survey by the National Sleep Foundation contained some startling statistics. In the survey, one of every four pilots admitted that lack of sleep affected their performance on the job at least once a week.

Train operators reported a comparable percentage.

People who lack sleep take longer to react, have diminished attention to their surroundings, and have difficulties with processing information. These are all significant problems for transportation workers, who must be able to respond safely to the conditions around them - no matter what type of vehicle they are operating.

When a pilot doesn't get enough sleep, an aviation accident becomes more likely. The same is true for truck drivers, train operators, and so on.