Well, I have to agree with the instructors most of the time. Your schedule gives you an hour for shower/dinner/sex/Family Guy and another 8 hours for sleep...I don't see the problem.
If you ever
really feel unsafe, have the balls to admit it, defend it, and go do something else with your day than flying. It works that way in the fleet, it works that way in flight school, and I have yet to see anyone crushed for backing out of a flight for legitimate reasons.
That being said, there WILL be times you push/pass 18 hours crew day, or 5 hours of preflight, or bust 8 hours crew rest. Then it becomes a judgement call. Thank goodness we are all mature responsible aviators who are able to make that call and stand by it either way...
Would you bust crew rest to go on a SAR mission? How about to go shoot down enemy tanks? To get eyes on a possibly hostile Chinese sub? How about busting crew rest to fly CAS on Marines desperately in need of backup in some shithole in Afghanistan? Would you bust crew rest to fly a 1.5 over American soil under radar control with a qualified instructor in the back seat?
Which one of these scenarios involves the most risk and which do you think requires the most "me time"?
To give you some idea this was a typical day for me on morning flightline in IERW
0340- wake up
0430- catch the bus to Cairns AAF (the AF gets to park their but not enough for the Army apparently and its our damn airfield)
0530- Initial Brief and morning Table Talk
0630- Aircraft issue, preflight, flight, debrief
1130- Earliest bus back to parking lot
1300- Academics
1830- academics over go home/tech lab
Rince repeat and continue for about 6 months. To add insult to injury we rotate weekly from morning to afternoon schedules which totally F's your sleep cycles up so the first about two days of Morning flightline get real interesting some times. My question was really simple, if you cant make the IP work/fly the same hours because of both his union contract and legal requirements how the hell are they making us do it.
The same type of rule applies to IPs because we know its unneccesarily dangerous to put them in that kind of work tempo doing something as inherently risky as teaching students to fly what is desperately trying to become a multimillion dollar one time use back hoe. However any time a student even brings up the words "crew rest requirements" its immediately smacked down with "suck it up pussy this is easier than what you'll do in the sandbox" or something similar. In that case if we aren't aircrew members than technically you're operating all our aircraft single pilot, and that gets into its own relm of rules (Single Pilot IFR anyone?).