Fatigue

[Crewing Gimp]

Hi All

Just wanted to know how your airline deals with fatigued crew members. Do they have to see a company doctor, or just fill out a form?

The Gimp

[JB007]

At my, now old company, Crew Fatigue Form completed for assessment - its relatively new and is been pushed hard by the company...

[no sig]

In absence of a Crew Fatique reporting scheme or an Ops manual procedure, I'd suggest that, in the first instance, the crew member should complete a Company Air Safety Report. They should, of course, be taken off the roster, until fit to fly. Fatique, (rather than simple tiredness) which results in reduced capacity as an operational crew member, may point to a roster/rest pattern that needs investigation- recording of a fatique event in formal manner is important. Your FTL scheme is designed to 'avoid fatique', if a crew member who has taken advantage of the rest opportunites it provides still ends up in a fatiqued state, then someting is wrong- somewhere.

A discussion with the Company GP, however, is a prudent course of action and should be seen as a supportive measure rather than one that puts the crew member's word in doubt.

[Dan Winterland]

Are you trying to develop a policy regarding fatigue? Or looking at a way of trying to manage it. Either way, it needs to be handled carefully. An ASR is not applicable if a crew member reports unfit for duty as they should only be filed in regards to an air incident. And no pilot wants to do that because of fatigue, or even mention that fatigue may have been a fator in any incident. In some legistlations, it is illegal to operate while fatigued. Where I fly, it's covered by the Air Navigation Order which is the law of the land, so flying while knowing to be fatigued is a criminal offence.

Speaking as a pilot, fatigue is the least understood and worst administered element of any flight time limitations system. A flight operations department does not want to hear the F word. As far as they are concerend, if you are flying within the Flight Time Limitations set by the relevant authority, then you can't be fatigued. This is of course nonsense. Firstly, the FTLs are a limit and therefore a MAXIMUM. But many operators treat them as a target. if you are running your staff at the maximum, then it has to be accepted that something is going to give if the circumstances deviate from the optimal.

The optimal case is a pilot who gets his/her rest as scheduled. But there are so many factors that can disrupt this. Personal health (which tends to deterorate as the limits are reached), stress factors (such as finances, bereavement, relationship issues) and rest facilities (sometimes the crew can't afford to live near the base and has to travel long distances - think of the Coglan ATR42 crash) all play a part. And the bit about 'taken advantage of the available rest opportunities' is again the optimal. Sometimes it's damn near impossible. For example, crew rest hotels are nearly always chosed with cost being the deciding factor. I have stayed in many hotels which are just not suitable for trying to get undisturberd rest during the local day. When they are next to a busy airport, near construction work, have staff vacuuming the corridor outside or curtains which don't block out the light - these are all going to prevent your crew from sleeping. Let alone them attempting sleep outside their circadian night.

And although the work schedule follows the FTLs to the letter of the law, it may often ignore advice. Both my last two company approved FTL schemes as approved by the national aviation authorities mentioned that rest periods between 18 and 30 hours should be avoided and repeated operations through the period of circadian low (2am to 6am body clock time) should be avoided. However, the word "should'' is not mandatory and was therefore largely ignored. So, how does this work out in reality. Take my last company, a UK long haul operator. I described a typical pattern on a previous thread about an Emirates crew who had a tailstrike on rotaion at Melbourne - the Capatain pointed out he was fatigued when the incident happened.


"The pilot stated it was a 24 hour layover, the most common in long haul and the worst for getting rest. CAD371 reduces duty times for rest periods of 18 to 30 hours as it is recognised that the quality of rest is reduced, or quality rest hard to take.

Don't understand that? The take this example of a pattern I was very familiar with.

Departure from LHR at about 7pm UK time. Land at JFK about 10pm NY time, but 2am body clock time. By the time you get to the hotel, it's now 4am body time. Go to bed. Wake up at 3am NY time which is 8am body time because it's when you usually get up and the wake up time your circadian rhythem is programmed for. So you've just had four hours sleep.

You mooch around for most of the morning, then at about 1pm NY time you go back to bed and try to sleep. Except you can't because it's 6pm body time and you're circadian rythem says it's not time to sleep yet.

It's now 5pm NY time and the wake up call goes off which is a bit of a b#gger because you finally dropped off to sleep about 20 minutes ago. You get up, go to the airport for the 8pm NY departure time, for which you aren't feeling at your best for because it's now 1am UK and body time and you have had 4 hours and twenty minutes of low quality sleep in the last 36. You now fly for 7 hours back to LHR landing at 8am feeling like death.

Now imagine you do this 5 or 6 times a month, for 900 flying hours a year, but not always to New York. Perhaps to other time zones in the opposite direction. Now some of you (who obviously haven't flown long haul as a pilot) may begin to understand how this pilot felt at the start of his duty.

Sure, it's easy to say he should have got some rest in his 24 hours off, but that's very hard when your body is saying it's not time to sleep. And he could have called in and told crewing that he wasn't rested enough to fly. But many long haul pilots get to this level of fatigue and if this was done then the majority of long haul flights would be cancelled".

With this company, I did four months of operations like this - six flights a month - 24 in total with rarely more than two days off in between each rotation. I had no rest, in fact I remember I had a leave period cancelled and I knew it was beginning to affect me. I was also under notice of redundacy with no job to go to - so I was also under stress. It only dawned on me how tired I was getting when I nearly crashed my car on the way into work. I called work and told them that I was not fit to operate. Their answer was that I had already set off to go to work and now I couldn't go sick. I pointed out that I wasn't going sick, I was fatigued and therefore couldn't work by law. And I was not fit to drive, let alone fly a B747 with 450 passengers for 8hours. I did go sick for a week, my doctor's note said ''Chronic fatigue". She mentioned to me that a week wasn't enough. I later heard the company wanted to bring me in for an interview, but a senior manager stopped this as he alone seemed to realise how precarious the company's position was in realtion to FTLs.

One of my colleuges in my present company went sick through fatigue. We have a line in our manuals which states that if a crewmember isn't getting effective rest, the company may refer him to a doctor (this statement is designed to look compassionate, but most of my colleagues view it as a veiled threat). They did refer him. The doctor diagnosed chronic fatigue and gave him a month off. The company didn't like this and got a second opinion from another AME. This one agreed with the diagnosis, but not the remedy and increased his sick leave to three months! he actually resigned during theose three months.


Whatever you implement, you need a sytem where patterns of fatigue are analysed and methods used to minimise them. The trend in modern aviation is to fly crews to the maximum. You need to realise that if this is your policy, then alllowances are going to have to be made. Otherwise you will end up with fatigued crews scared to call in sick and the result could be another Coglan type incident.

[no sig]

Dan,

Your post will be informative for many crewing/ops officers and, it is, very important that they understand the life crew lead- putting themselves in your shoes so to speak. Although a CAP371 requirement, I regret that Human Factors training isn't something many UK ops/crewing/rostering officers have adequate training in.

My point about the ASR is that, in absence of a fatique risk management scheme, or an fatique crew reporting system, how do you capture fatique incidents for analysis?- it is after all an air safety issue. But, I also know it isn't always that simple and your points are well taken.

It's alway been interesting to me that there is no definition of fatique in CAP 371, The Avoidance of Fatique in Aircrew. Of course Bader defined it, but the line between tired and fatique can be very blurred and I agree, little understood.

[Dan Winterland]

Yes, It's a well noted irony that the subject of the document has no definition. the problem is that it is very hard to define, or diagnose. Often, the crew member themself may not know tha they are fatigued. The onset of fatigue is very insidious and it takes either an incident or a friend/colleague to point it out.

Also, fatigue affects diffrent people to varying levels. Persoanlly, I found that as I got older, my circadian rythym became more entrenched and I was finding it harder to get effective rest. this is one of the factors which made me decide to resign from a long haul job and start flying short haul. I still get fatigued (I've just come off a 9.5 hour duty ending at 1.30am and am having my wind down beer while PPruNing) and am pretty tired. But I'm not suffering acute fatigue on top of underlying chronic fatigue which I often suffered on long haul operations and which in my experience, is the most dangerous set of circumstances.

As for the reporting of fatigue, it's one area of flight safety which is not well served. The only effective avenue is one of the various confidential schemes which exist around the industry. As I metioned, 'fatigue' is the one word that managers do not want to hear. Perhaps because it's so prevalent. And perhaps now is the time for someone to bite the bullet and introduce a scheme. But unfortunately, as flying becomes safer with the introduction of systems such as TAWS and ACAS, pilot error statistics are proportionally on the rise. And fatigue related incidents are featuring more. So there is some reporting going on!

I'm glad my post may be of some help.