Fatigue Is the House Hazard
Everything about freight flying is arranged against sleep: the duties are at night, the rest is in daylight, the rotations move you through time zones, and the schedule is built around a sort rather than a circadian rhythm. The effects are well characterised — slowed reaction, narrowed attention, degraded judgement about your own state, and a strong tendency to accept the first workable answer rather than the best one.
Two practical points crews repeat. First, the self-assessment is the least reliable instrument on the aircraft; ask the other seat what they see. Second, protect the sleep opportunity actively rather than hoping for it, which is the entire content of the Hotels page. The formal framework is on the ICAO fatigue management pages.
Night Visual Illusions
Night approaches into unlit terrain, over water, or to a runway with sloping ground or unusual lighting produce well-documented illusions: the black-hole approach, false horizons, the effect of runway width and slope on perceived glidepath, and autokinesis when fixating on a single light. Freight crews meet these more than most because most of the approaches are at night, often to smaller fields with basic lighting. the FAA Aeronautical Information Manual chapter on medical facts for pilots is a good half-hour before a season of night outstation work.
The Rush
Time pressure is the freight world's characteristic error-producing condition. A sort window, a curfew, a slot and a crew duty limit can all be closing at once, and every one of them creates a reason to skip a step. The industry's accident record contains a long line of events whose first link was somebody in a hurry on the ground.
The countermeasures are unglamorous and they work: run the checklist at the checklist's pace, say the words out loud, refuse to accept a rushed briefing, and treat any suggestion to "just" do something as a signal rather than a shortcut.
Two Crew, One Mindset
Small, stable freight crews fly together for weeks, know each other well, and develop shorthand. That is mostly an asset and occasionally a hazard, because a very comfortable flight deck can stop challenging. Crew resource management training exists to keep the challenge alive; the crew-room version is to notice when the last hour has contained no questions.
Season Change
The two most instructive weeks of the year are the first cold week and the first convective week, because both bring back procedures that have not been used for six months. Reread the de-icing and holdover material in October and the thunderstorm and windshear material in April, before the season rather than during it. NTSB investigation reports and other national investigators publish the case material, and the value of reading them is not the conclusions but the sequence — how ordinary the first six decisions always look.
New Station, New Everything
A first visit to a station is where local knowledge is thinnest: unfamiliar taxi layout, unfamiliar handling agent, unfamiliar ramp lighting, and no instinct for what normal looks like. Build in the extra minutes, brief the taxi route properly, and treat the first walkaround as a survey of the environment as well as the aircraft. See Airport Safety.
Say It Early
The recurring lesson in every one of these briefs is the same: the cheap moment to raise a concern is before it becomes operational. A fatigue call at the hotel is a rostering problem. The same call at the aircraft is a delay. The same realisation at the top of descent is something else entirely.