Ancient Observer wrote
think of chemical plants, nuclear plants and so on. They often have very creative, very flexible rosters. The individuals in control have just as much responsibility as pilots. They also have the possibility of fatigue.
They work much longer hours than pilots and cc.
I would suggest that you research them as well.
Well, it is interesting that you should admonish us to do so as to an extent I have when I was writing a short book two years ago. I post a short sentence or two from my discussions with a a chance meeting that I had with a sleep researching physician. The operators/workers in the nuclear and chemical industry face a litany of fatigue issues themselves. It is increasingly coming under researchers' purview that anyone who works in a "rotating shift" environment is prone to a number of physical and psychological stress issues.
Having grown up within sight of the Three Mile Reactor, I have little doubt that this growing corpus body of research is not far from the mark.
This, in my humblest of opinions, is where the journalist from the Guardian should start to form the framework for his writings--the coorelation between air transport work and other industries in their approaches in scheduling and the pitfalls such work schedules present.
I use the below words with my own permission
Seated next to me was a physician, a sleep researcher, from a renowned medical university, who had begun the conversation by asking me what I thought of the way in which aircraft were pressurized and the high cabin altitudes at which we flew for hours. I quickly realized that this man was asking a little more than the usual “is it true that we are at the same altitude in the plane as being at a ski resort in Colorado?” In fact, I was so startled by his breadth of knowledge, that soon it was I who was asking questions of him, but not before he posed an intriguing problem.
He waxed a bit philosophical as he asked me if I knew what the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal India, the incident at Three Mile Island, the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez, and many trucking accidents have in common. I thought for a moment as I twisted my dinner fork around a few times. When he realized that my answers were well wide of the mark, he revealed that the common thread was that all occurred under the supervision of shift workers at a time when they normally would have been asleep. Bhopal and the Exxon Valdez occurred shortly after midnight, Three Mile Island at 4 a.m., and the trucking accidents have a strong statistical cluster between 4 and 7 a.m. They were not just night shift workers, he went on, but much worse, workers in which the schedules were constantly rotating between day and night. The physician, already knowing the answer smiled mischievously and asked, “Do you ever work schedules like that?”
There is, of course, much more to the stories of Bhopal, Three Mile Island and the other incidents than just workers who needed to be in the land of Nod instead of on the clock, but he was touching on a theme that is almost an obsession with aircrews around the world, namely work rest cycles and how and when to get good rest.