Wall Street Journal article on EK crewing problem.
Broken promise
From what I understand EK use the Boeing alertness model to measure fatigue on trip combos and crew rosters. If any fatigue management system relies on it then it has to be backed up by active crew input e.g sleep diary and motion watch, sleep plans, fatigue promotion, active pilot representation at meetings etc. From what I understand jeppesen are missing one vital ingredient - data. The module uses the karolinski sleep wake predictor to measure fatigue but only uses it to a certain
degree e.g without data the output comes out seven stages less than the real programme used by the sleepy scientists. You also then need a sleepy scientist to review the content rather than a commuter programmer. So whilst it will give a reasonable average it's just that. We also know that all pilots are different!. One thing that the swp does also is measure leisure time - in case the fatigue is carrying into it - this can also be impacted by commuting the word that goes out the window as far as pilots are concerned I guess less of a problem for EK. With days off seemingly at a premium at EK the risk to the airline is that sleep debt rolls into leisure and then the crew members use any rest days e.g before flying say in the evening to catch up on day to day chores e.g doing the school run, shopping when they should be resting for flight.
You then repeat the cycle into possible fatigue issues, remembering there is a difference between sleepy ness for the occasional ripper trip and cumulative fatigue for the daily grinder or nightly as the case maybe!