Repeatedly taking off and landing can rapidly sap a pilot's energy, leading to pilot fatigue
THE YELL of "Dad, what are you doing!" woke me up seconds from disaster in a tunnel on the Amsterdam ring road. My car, towing a sailboat, was drifting across two lanes, and was heading for an impact with the wall of the tunnel. I rapidly straightened the car, thankful that falling asleep at the wheel had mercifully occurred in a gap in the traffic.
I was also thankful that my son was awake too. Both of us had been travelling since earlier the previous day, taking a ferry to Holyhead, driving across Wales and England, taking the ferry to Holland and settling in for a long drive to the Friesland lakes. We shared the driving and slept where possible but it was now obvious that a sleep deficit was crying out to be rectified.
I was seconds from becoming one of the 25 per cent of all fatal road accident statistics reckoned to be caused by fatigue. Underestimating the impact of sleep deprivation is easy for an amateur driver who rarely takes long trips.
But transport professionals, such as truck drivers, ship's captains and airline pilots, all belong to a highly regulated sector where training and inspections preclude anything remotely like that happening.
You'd think, wouldn't you?
In February, two pilots fell asleep at the controls of their Mesa Airlines jet and overflew the Hawaiian island of Hilo, where they were supposed to land. Air traffic controllers finally woke them 18 minutes later as they headed out across the Pacific Ocean and a date with death should fuel run low.
Although they had been on duty for only four and a half hours, it was the third day in a sequence of flight duties that involved very early starts. Later, one of the pilots was diagnosed as suffering from sleep apnea, a condition which prevents deep and restful sleep.
In October 2004 after a commuter airliner crash which killed 13 at Kirksville, Missouri, investigators discovered the pilots had been on duty for 14.5 hours after a very early start and a day during which they had made five landings in very poor weather.
When an incoming Delta Connection flight ran off the end of the runway at Cleveland Ohio in February 2007, investigators discovered the captain, an insomniac, had not slept for 31 hours. He had told colleagues that he was tired before take-off but was afraid to tell his employers for fear of getting the sack.
After a Pinnacle Airlines jet ran off the runway at Traverse City, Michigan in April 2007, crash investigators discovered the pilots had been on duty for 14 hours during which they completed four challenging landings in poor weather. The pilots were heard yawning repeatedly when investigators reviewed the cockpit voice tapes.
Since 1970, US crash investigators with the national Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued 115 fatigue-related warnings to transport operators, including airlines. Recently, after reviewing the cases listed above, they issued another. Pilot error, compounded by fatigue, remains one of the biggest killers in aviation and, undoubtedly, in road traffic accidents too.
According to the pilot group European Cockpit Association, accidents are six times more likely if a pilot has been on duty more than 12 hours.
Pilots are restricted to flying 900 hours a year, and 100 in any month but, as the statistics above demonstrate, it is possible to be on duty more than 14 hours in a day and still be at the controls.
Flying time is measured from the time the aircraft leaves the gate to when it arrives at its destination but pilots have other work to do planning their flights, assessing the weather, checking their aircraft and, sometimes, training other pilots. Most of the regulations governing the length of time pilots can fly in this country, the UK and the US are based on guidelines drawn up by second World War fighter ace Douglas Bader in the 1950s.
Then, most pilots made one or two return flights a day, or else had a lengthy transatlantic trip, followed by a hotel stop-over. Bader and his successors assumed that flying the Atlantic, and the subsequent jet-lag, generated the greatest amount of fatigue.
But a new threat to safety has emerged. Nowadays, thanks to the more frequent schedules demanded by low-cost carriers, a far greater number of daily flights are flown with little or no rest time in between. The standard set by Ryanair, for example, and copied by many other airlines, requires that an aircraft be ready for take-off 25 minutes after arriving.
And it's not just a question of time in the air. Research has shown that repeatedly taking off and landing, especially landing, can rapidly sap a pilot's energy, especially in poor weather.
Punishing schedules can have a pilot either reporting for work during unsociable hours very early in the morning, or working until very late at night.
"You're working when your body says you should be sleeping," says Prof Nick McDonald, of the Centre for Transport Research and Innovation for People at TCD. "There have been enormous pressures to get people working in a flexible way for a longer and longer part of the 24-hour cycle."
Cockpit crew have what is termed "commander's discretion" when, if they feel they can cope, they can briefly extend their hours to make up for earlier delays and to get an aircraft back to its home airport.
According to Captain Neil Johnson of the Irish Airline Pilots Association, some carriers are demanding that this discretion should always operate in the airline's favour.
Johnson claims that at least one pilot has been disciplined for refusing to exercise this discretion to the extent that many are now reluctant to refuse to work extra hours.
The UK Civil Aviation Authority has tightened up the regulations on what can and cannot be done with commander's discretion but in Ireland the issue appears to be slightly more permissive in an airline's favour.
"The regulations are really due for an overhaul on a Europe-wide basis but nobody wants to write a regulation that disadvantages anyone," says McDonald. He was commenting on a stalled EU initiative to fully harmonise flying hours in all member states.
The latest NTSB report on fatigue in aviation has called on the Federal Aviation Authority, which regulates US aviation, to promote more research into fatigue management and to encourage US airlines to adopt it. But so far only one airline, the UK's EasyJet, has done any meaningful homework on what makes pilots tired, and how it can be prevented.
The EasyJet system has been nicknamed the 5354 because pilots work five days on, three days off, five days on, four days off. It followed research into what made pilots tired.
Fatigue was found to be worse if a pilot worked a late shift, followed by an early one so EasyJet decided that pilots should no longer have early and late shifts mixed in the same duty roster. Instead they will fly five early shifts in a row followed by three days' leave.
When the pilot comes back on duty he will fly five late shifts but this must be followed by four days' leave. It's then back to a week of early shifts. Pilots flying the new system were found to be much more alert and made fewer errors.
"The EasyJet research was interesting because the classic research had been done on long-haul flying," says McDonald. "Until now there has been very little work done on fatigue in short-haul flying."