My concern is that the structure of the questionnaire is flawed.
If just one person out of a thousand puts a response to Q 4.1a
"Has passenger safety ever been put at risk as a result of your fatigue?"
You can bet that it will feature in the article/programme. I am sceptical whether "99.9% of pilots have never had a fatigue-related incident" has the same journalistic appeal. This is known as 'counting the hits and ignoring the misses', is very unscientific and serves only to convince myself that this report will be biased from the start.
My own stats would show that my flying hours have increased, since in 2002 I worked for a 'full-service' airline with a union maximum of 750 rostered hours a year, now I work for a low-cost airline with a far better safety record but up to 900 hours flying a year.
What I don't do now are positioning flights, night flights, long taxi journeys around the country prior to flying and nights spent away from family - all of which , IMHO, have a far worse ultimate effect on flying fatigue. But the 'hours-related' survey won't show this.
You will almost certainly be able to prove that pilots are flying more hours now than in the past. However, this will not provide any direct causal link to flight safety, but I expect any programme based on the survey will be likely to imply this (irresponsibly, I believe).
We are also very likely flying more now than 50 years ago, but there is no doubt that overall flight safety (accidents/incidents related to totla global/national flying hours) has improved.
We can also discover from the accident records that human psychological and physiological factors (of which fatigue is usually one) are playing an increasing part in aircraft incidents over the years - but the since the technology improves (GPWS, TCAS, better instrumentation) and humans don't (to the same degree), that is to be expected.
The important point is that overall flight safety is improving (in the UK, at least) in relation to the expansion of the aviation industry - which will not be demonstrated by the questions asked in the survey.
The very feature of the industry which optimises safety - the open and honest reporting culture and the understanding that humans are fallible - is the feature which is often exploited to sell newspapers/TV programmes. the medical profession doesn't have such a culture - do fatigue-related incidents happen in hospitals - almost certainly. Are there stats available? Almost certainly not. So can they do much about it? Not as much as we can.
You seem to have established a lot more credibility on here than may in your profession in the past, please don't betray the insight into the industry which you have been given by undermining the safety culture we have worked so hard to establish...it is not hard to imagine the pilot, who, after his employer has received a bashing in the press following a damning news article, decides he doesn't want to enrage his employers by calling in fatigued...
I hope I will be proved wrong, Ian, but since most of your colleagues seem no longer able to produce articles for the modern media without either a political/commercial (ie ratings) agenda or by dressing up this mornings corporate survey/press release as news I am not optimistic.
Good luck
Last edited by Gary Lager; 15th Apr 2007 at 12:41.