Bengaluru: The cause of a crash of an Indian Air Force fighter jet in the year 2013 was due to sleep deprivation issue over the use of social media by a pilot, Air Chief Marshal B S Dhanoa said on Friday in a very stunning revelation. Spending time on social media sites especially at night is resulting in sleep deprivation among pilots, Air Chief Marshal Dhanoa said while urging the need to develop a system to identify if the pilots had slept enough before taking off on sorties.

“Flying sorties when the temperature goes beyond 40-degree Celsius is discouraged and so flight briefings take place early,” he said while speaking at the 57th Indian Society of Aerospace Medicine conference held in Bengaluru.

“Everybody appears to be spending long hours on social media, late nights. Most flight briefings, sometimes, are as early as 6 am and pilots haven’t had enough sleep,” he said.

“We had an unfortunate air crash at Uttarlai (near Barmer in Rajasthan) in the year 2013 that resulted because of continuous sleep deprivation for a number of days. This is something which is a new challenge for us because of the changes in our society,” he said.

Air Chief Marshal Dhanoa urged the Institute of Aerospace Medicine to come up with a system to identify whether pilots had enough sleep before going for flying sorties.

“Earlier if a pilot had one drink too many, the barman would know. If he failed to notice, the others would know and he would be laid off flying for the day. Today we even have breath analyzers,” he said.

“Therefore, we need a system where one can find out if a pilot had enough sleep,” he added.

As of now, he said, that social media has become a form of indispensable communication platform as it is taking away interpersonal and communication skills.

There have been many reports of accidents which were caused due to social media over usage. If not control the habit of using it becomes addictive resulting excessive usage which in turn becomes a hurdle in the way of sleep. The best way is to observe a week or less every month to relax oneself from dependence on social media in our daily life.

Most recently, big giants like facebook and twitter social media platforms have been accused of not protecting private user profiles resulting in data theft.

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