Qatar Airways pilots warn about unaccounted working hours and hidden fatigue.
Pilots at Qatar Airways say the state-owned airline is under-counting their work hours and ignoring complaints of fatigue – a safety breach that hurts staff health and risks passenger lives.
The testimony demonstrates how worker abuse extends even to the Gulf nation’s high-skill industries, as Qatar Airways tries to minimise crew downtime.
“This is obviously a huge health and safety issue for the pilots themselves – and the people they’re flying,” said Isobel Archer of the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre.
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The revelations come months before Qatar hosts its first World Cup with Qatar Airways – as lead sponsor – hoping to be football’s carrier of choice. But pilots worry about the risks fans could run, saying ultra-long flights are now operated by short-staffed and exhausted crews, a pressure only made worse by the pandemic.
“I fell asleep during the descent with 400 passengers on board,” recalled Erik of one such 20-hour flight that he landed safely at the carrier’s Doha base.
“You can’t do anything. Your body is just screaming for rest. You feel the pain inside of your chest, and you’re unable to keep your eyes open,” the first officer told the Reuters, using a pseudonym so he could speak more freely.
Erik and six other flight crew members said the airline’s work hours were driving them into exhaustion and that managers were refusing to give them enough rest.
Many did not even file fatigue reports, fearing additional scrutiny from an airline that made thousands of staff redundant in the pandemic. Others said their reports were ignored or didn’t get rest to match the shift worked.
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“We’re overworked and fatigued – but I never filled out a fatigue report because I don’t want to be in the spotlight,” said Erik.
The manual states that for fatigue mitigation, “in-flight rest does not count as flight time”, straying from a standard calculation used by most civil aviation authorities.
“They count the hours in a different way. Not so long ago I was the ‘third pilot’ on duty – my duty was monitoring the pilots in the front, so I was 100% active,” Erik said.
“The flight time was one hour and 33 minutes, but the counted time was only three minutes. That’s what went towards my flying limit,” he said.
Two fellow first officers logged in-flight hours for the first two weeks of January that exceeded 115 hours, above the 28-day limit of 100 hours listed in the airline’s own manual.
Reuters asked Qatar Airways whether it had noted an increase in fatigue or related safety concerns, how it calculated work and rest hours, and whether it was taking steps to make staff more comfortable with reporting fatigue.
A spokesperson said the company was engaging with employees “to ensure that the rest time and rostering needs of our Flight Crew team are strictly balanced with the airline’s operational requirements, especially given the unique challenges facing the global commercial aviation sector.”
The airline indicated that it had implemented “enhanced conditions for hours worked,” but did not provide details and said it was working to put in place “the most rigorous fatigue risk management program.”
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