Cargo airline pilots are explicitly exempt from FAR Part 117 fatigue rules, flying under 1960s-era rest requirements despite operating the most fatigue-inducing overnight schedules

When the FAA enacted Part 117 flight duty and rest requirements in January 2014 following the 2009 Colgan Air crash that killed 50 people, the White House Office of Management and Budget ordered cargo operations removed from the rule because 'compliance costs significantly exceed the quantified societal benefits.' As a result, pilots at FedEx, UPS, Atlas Air, and other all-cargo carriers still fly under pre-2014 Part 121 Subpart Q rules that do not account for circadian rhythm science, time-of-day fatigue factors, or cumulative sleep debt. Why it matters: Cargo pilots routinely fly red-eye and around-the-world schedules under the most fatigue-inducing conditions in aviation, so they accumulate dangerous levels of sleep debt that impair judgment and reaction time, so catastrophic errors become more probable (the NTSB cited pilot fatigue as a factor in the August 2013 crash of UPS Flight 1354 in Birmingham, Alabama, killing both crew members -- just 8 months after Part 117 took effect without covering cargo), so the implicit regulatory message is that cargo pilots' lives are worth less than passenger pilots' lives, so the industry perpetuates a two-tier safety standard that 79% of surveyed pilots consider unjust and dangerous. The structural root cause is that the FAA's cost-benefit analysis framework values human life by the number of people on the aircraft, so a cargo plane crash killing 2 crew members scores far lower in 'societal benefit' than a passenger crash killing 150 -- creating a perverse economic incentive to leave cargo pilots unprotected despite identical fatigue physiology.