Narrative:

Approach kept us in tight and first officer was working hard to get aircraft down for visual approach while using autopilot fpa for vertical descent control. We were cleared for visual approach on heading of 260 and switched to tower at about 6 miles from touchdown. I switched to tower and received landing clearance. I then observed aircraft to be approximately one dot low on glideslope and still descending. I called for first officer to correct this and he immediately disengaged autopilot and leveled at 2200 ft MSL. Tower then issued us a low altitude alert; which I acknowledged. First officer corrected on to the glideslope and met stabilized parameters at 1000 ft and 500 ft for normal landing. Altitude at time of alert was approx. 2200 ft MSL and 6 mi from threshold. No traffic or terrain conflicts were noted.I believe this occurred largely due to fatigue from a long duty day with four legs and nearly 8 hour of block time. I had noticed a tendency for my first officer to make minor errors; which he never made in the preceding 3 days. Fatigue certainly played a role in my not catching his error sooner. This type of pairing is a recipe for inducing fatigue related errors into the cockpit. Even though we do our best to avoid mistakes on long duty days it becomes very difficult to keep our 'guard' up by the last leg of the day. I believe that multiple day trips should be built to have longest duty days first so that the last day contains the least block/duty time. This would help alleviate some the cumulative fatigue that occurs from being on the road with odd hours and sometimes very little sleep

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: Air carrier Captain described how fatigue might have contributed to his First Officer descending below the glide path on a night visual approach and for the reporter not to recognize the deviation in a timely manor.

Narrative: Approach kept us in tight and First Officer was working hard to get aircraft down for visual approach while using autopilot FPA for vertical descent control. We were cleared for visual approach on heading of 260 and switched to tower at about 6 miles from touchdown. I switched to tower and received landing clearance. I then observed aircraft to be approximately one dot low on glideslope and still descending. I called for First Officer to correct this and he immediately disengaged autopilot and leveled at 2200 FT MSL. Tower then issued us a low altitude alert; which I acknowledged. First Officer corrected on to the glideslope and met stabilized parameters at 1000 FT and 500 FT for normal landing. Altitude at time of alert was approx. 2200 FT MSL and 6 MI from threshold. No traffic or terrain conflicts were noted.I believe this occurred largely due to fatigue from a long duty day with four legs and nearly 8 hour of block time. I had noticed a tendency for my First Officer to make minor errors; which he never made in the preceding 3 days. Fatigue certainly played a role in my not catching his error sooner. This type of pairing is a recipe for inducing fatigue related errors into the cockpit. Even though we do our best to avoid mistakes on long duty days it becomes very difficult to keep our 'guard' up by the last leg of the day. I believe that multiple day trips should be built to have longest duty days first so that the last day contains the least block/duty time. This would help alleviate some the cumulative fatigue that occurs from being on the road with odd hours and sometimes very little sleep

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site as of April 2012 and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.