Recently, we were treated to the most excellent and inspirational five minutes of flying an airplane that we will ever see. The skilled pilot and crew who maneuvered a disabled jetliner to a crash landing in New York’s Hudson River without the loss of a single life is the stuff of legends, an event that will forever be held up as perfection in potentially fatal circumstances.

But this was a pilot and crew that clearly had all its faculties in perfect alignment. The airline industry can take pride in what happened, but it needs to focus on less positive matters.

The United Nations agency that sets standards for air transport is drawing up new safety rules to take into account what it labels a silent killer: Pilot fatigue. We’re told that over the past 15 years nearly a dozen fatal crashes and numerous close calls have occurred because of worn-out pilots. Safety experts compare this condition to drunken driving of a motor vehicle. Pilot fatigue was a cause of one of the deadliest crashes in aviation history — when a Korean Air Boeing 747 heading to Guam slammed into a hillside in 1997 and killed 228 people. How aware are most of us about that?

Air safety and pilot unions have for years pressed for tighter regulation and enforcement of working hours and rest periods. Scientific research says pilot fatigue is a factor in a fifth of all fatal crashes. Symptoms can include longer reaction times, short-term memory loss, impaired judgment and reduced visual perception. Imagine if any or all of these factors had figured in the process of guiding that plane in New York.

Pilots complain that mandated rest periods are now only calculated according to the time spent in the air rather than total time on duty. A pilot’s daily schedule might include only a short period of actual flying but 12 to 14 hours of total time on duty. This can include layovers, delays and mechanical difficulty that prolongs a flier’s presence.

Rosters sometimes call for a crew to work three or four straight days. Crew rest periods often include transit time to and from hotels and meal times, so that a nine-hour rest period might allow for only about six hours of sleep.

Sometimes cockpit naps are tried. Some regulations allow one pilot to nap while the other works during a cruise to keep both alert for landing. Does that raise any red flags?

Who wants to be a passenger on an airplane guided by somebody who is on the end of a series of 60-hour duty weeks? It happens, and that needs to be changed.

With pilot fatigue a factor in one-fifth of airliner accidents, it’s little wonder the United Nations along with air safety experts, including the pilots themselves, believe major changes are needed as soon as possible.