Without even realizing it, our abilities decline once we fail to get our recommended eight hours of sleep. Response times, decision-making, reflexes, mental focus and mood all begin to slide once a human begins building a sleep deficit. All the while, the propensity for risk-taking increases. In short, fatigue and sleep deprivation can put even the most highly trained, qualified and experienced people in an irrational state of mind. As one expert told News21: “It makes them stupid.”

As we examine fatigue in the transportation industry, we’ve found that the NTSB has issued repeated recommendations to regulatory agencies across all sectors, some dating as far back as the early 1970s. These recommendations have largely been ignored.

In aviation, there is rarely, if ever, a single cause for an accident or incident. Often the circumstances are more like the links in a chain. Fatigue’s place in this chain is most often evident when something has gone wrong. It’s the decision or reaction to that first link in the chain where the real trouble can begin for a fatigued flight crew.

It was an element in the Colgan Air crash near Buffalo, New York that killed 50 people in February 2009. And it has been a factor in hundreds of other deaths over the years.

Yet little has been done to protect pilots, traffic controllers and the flying public from the one bad decision, on the one bad day a pilot or controller might have during an otherwise long and unblemished career.

The recommendations are fairly simple: Change the limits of flight and duty times for flight crews so that it takes into account modern research into sleep, fatigue and circadian rhythms.

While we wait for regulatory agencies to change the rules, a pilot is climbing in the cockpit after a fitful night of undiagnosed sleep apnea; or a controller peers into the glass of his scope with a few hours of sleep and a hot cup of coffee.

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If you have a story to tell or want to talk about fatigue or another safety issue related to transportation, contact charlie.litton@news21.com

Help me show people what a day in the life of a pilot is really like. E-mail Tessa Muggeridge at tessa.muggeridge@news21.com or tweet at her at twitter.com/tessa_news21. Follow the entire transportation project as it progresses here at national.news21.com.

The Egypt government disputes the conclusion reached through the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation determining that pilot Gameel Al-Batouti crashed the aircraft on purpose, killing all 217 people on board. Investigators reached this conclusion after carefully reviewing data and audio recorders from the plane’s black boxes. Egyptian officials say there is no way the seasoned pilot, nearing retirement, would have committed suicide and mass murder, and they say a mechanical malfunction must be to blame.

The safety board uses this tragedy as an example of why it wants the Federal Aviation Administration to require video or image recorders in the cockpits of large commercial and even some small airplanes (click here to read the NTSB recommendation). With the help of images, they could conclude investigations faster and find out more, which means family members of those who die in plane crashes would have clearer answers, and sooner.

Some family members are still perplexed by the events of that night. Jim Brokaw, who lost his father and stepmother in the EgyptAir crash, founded Families of EgyptAir 900, and a website for the victims’ families to speak to each other about their loss. The site is no longer active.

In a National Geographic Channel program titled “Air Crash Investigation,” some family members talked openly about those they lost in the EgyptAir crash. The episode can be watched in segments on youtube (click here).

As the recipient of a News21 journalism fellowship, I will be reporting on the issue of image recorders in cockpits this summer, and I am searching for family members of victims killed in the EgyptAir crash to round out my reporting. There are other crashes that could have been better understood with image recorders, such as the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, United Airlines flight 93. My hope is that those families might want to talk about the issue of image recorders, too. I also want to speak to families who have lost someone in a small, non-commercial airplane crash, but still aren’t entirely sure why because the plane lacked recording devices.

I understand this is a sensitive topic for these family members and would like to approach them with the utmost respect and kindness while also gaining enough information to write compelling and useful journalism. If anyone can help, please contact me by e-mail: stevie.mathieu@news21.com.