EMMA KELLY / PERTH
Extensive Australian analysis aimed at implementing risk-based crew rostering
An Australian team comprising Qantas, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), the University of South Australia's Centre for Sleep Research and the Australian and International Pilots Association (AIPA) will next month embark on the second phase of what it believes is the most extensive scientific analysis of pilot fatigue ever conducted. The Fatigue Risk Management System (FRMS) study is designed to lead to the development of a risk management-based system for flightcrew rostering.
The study, originally launched with now-defunct Ansett, is the first in which industry, a union, a regulator and the scientific community have joined forces to quantify fatigue risk, according to Qantas. In the first phase, volunteer flightcrew have been keeping sleep/wake diaries and have worn wristwatch-type activity monitors adapted by the university to obtain data on sleep patterns. The objective is to build a system or methodology to determine how much and what quality sleep pilots get, says Professor Drew Dawson, director of the Centre for Sleep Research. Data has already been collected on about 4,000 sleep-wake cycles, and a further 4,000 cycles will be monitored over the next 12 months.
The second phase, to begin next month, will research how quickly pilots' "body clocks" adapt to time zone changes. Researchers will track pilots around the world and monitor their activities, "measuring their performance on a range of fatigue detection tasks", says Dawson. The final phase, due to start in July, will monitor pilots in flight simulators to link real performance measures with predicted fatigue.
"If you look at most fatigue studies in aviation they have involved laboratory studies or followed a small number of pilots. We're trying to follow large numbers of pilots and track them closely," says Dawson. Past studies have also measured response via "button-pushing techniques", he says, but this study will focus on pilots' performance in the cockpit. The data will be used to develop models to determine how different flight tasks are affected by fatigue.
Qantas says it wants to be able to use such a model to set pilot rosters, shifts and duty time. "The FRMS has the potential to be the single biggest improvement in the management of pilot fatigue and rostering since the flight time limitations were introduced," says Capt Richard Woodward, AIPA's technical and safety director.
Source: Flight International
