We Practice Every Emergency Except That One

Three days on a Seattle turn. The guy I was flying with was late getting his flows done every brief. Small errors. Nothing dangerous — just not him.

Third day, in the hotel van, he said: “Man, I haven’t slept in two weeks.”

We nodded. Looked at our phones. Got on the bus.

Nobody asked why. I didn’t ask why.

I’ve thought about that van a lot since then. Not because something bad happened — he was fine, as far as I know. I think about it because of what I felt in that moment: I didn’t want to open something I didn’t know how to close. We had a 6am show. And there’s an unspoken rule in aviation that you don’t slow the operation down with feelings. You don’t make it weird.

So we make it quiet instead.

Here’s the thing nobody says out loud: we’re not callous. Most pilots I know are deeply attuned to the people they fly with — you have to be, it’s part of the job. But attunement without permission to act just becomes a low-grade anxiety you carry through the terminal and home to your family.

We practice every emergency except that one. There are checklists for smoke in the cockpit, for hydraulic failure, for the unruly passenger. There is no checklist for: your colleague just told you he hasn’t slept in two weeks and you have four legs together tomorrow.

What would have made that conversation happen? Not a policy. Not a poster in the crew room.

One time, somewhere in training, someone modeling what it looks like to ask.

Hey. Two weeks is a long time. What’s going on?

That’s it. That’s the whole checklist.