Editor’s Note: Bob Perkins spent four years in the U.S. Air Force as an instructor pilot where he became a captain. He now is the president of Consensus Research Company based in New York City.

Who’s awake anyway?

The recent incident of a Northwest Airlines flight staying on autopilot for an extra 20 minutes has raised the issue of pilots "napping" on the job. Let’s be honest: Pilots have been sleeping in airplanes since there were airplanes … the goal is always to have at least one pilot awake.

Why is this? First, flying has gotten to be very boring. If you don’t believe me, sit in a chair, look out the window and sit there for three hours. Once every 30 minutes, pick up your cell phone, call a number for 30 seconds and hang up. That is what the NWA flight was like, except it was dark outside for most of the trip.

Decades ago, I was an instructor pilot in the U.S. Air Force in a high-performance airplane. It was supersonic, could roll at 720 degrees a second and held the time-to-climb record. Mostly, I taught second lieutenants how to stay alive until they could get into an airplane more suited to their talents. But when we flew a cross-country mission that required an hour of cruising six miles above the ground, I "napped" all the time. It was boring.

Second, pilots really have two tasks. One is to make sure the autopilot, the auto gear lifter and the auto flap lower and the automatic coffeemaker work. Not very tough. The second is to show incredible judgment, finesse and cool in panicky situations (let’s call it the "judgment" task). We had a Miracle on the Hudson because you had a fabulous set of pilots doing a miraculous job and being very lucky.

In my old Pilot Instructor job, we didn’t have any "auto" anything on the T-38. It took most of your attention to keep the airplane going and the student pilot from killing you.

But, in a commercial airliner, the ratio of "auto tasks" to "judgment" tasks is about 1,000 to one. That is, you spend 25 weeks (at 40 hours a week) and do one hour of "judgment."

Given that ratio, airline passengers don’t want to pay big bucks for judgment. What are the odds that you’ll be in that one tenth of one percent when judgment is essential? Low.

So pilots get paid less, work more and have fewer hours between flights. And we shouldn’t be surprised when a few of them nod off in the auto task mode.

The bible of all real pilots is Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff. It captured the ethic of pilots, particularly fighter pilots, perfectly. It isn’t an accident that the best pilot ever, Chuck Yeager, never wanted to be an astronaut. Why would you give up flying a real airplane to become a "monkey in a can"? Astronauts didn’t fly their capsules, they rode. General Yeager never wanted to be a passenger.

Yet, the truth is for most flights, most of the time, modern airline pilots are almost passengers. And until we are willing to pay them more, let them sleep more and treat them as people, not machines, we shouldn’t be surprised if one or two nap away.