EUROPE, THE USA and Canada are all about to draw up vital new regulations on the safety-related issue of aircrew flight-time limitations, yet there is no evidence that they are trying to harmonise those rules. Given that the same bodies wish rulemaking to harmonise everything from aircrew licensing to aircraft certification, that failure seems inexplicable.
Europe's Joint Aviation Authorities (JAA) calls them flight-time limitations (FTL); the International Federation of Airline Pilots Association describes them as "aircrew flight and duty time limitations and rest requirements". No matter how they are defined, they govern the number of hours deemed safe for a pilot to be in charge of an airliner. Some countries have no FTLs; some have inadequate ones: none has universally accepted ones.
The danger of aircrew fatigue is scarcely a matter to be trifled with. Presumably the JAA, FAA and Transport Canada agree on that. Setting standardised rules should remove the temptation for airlines, in an increasingly competitive global marketplace, to overwork their aircrews to gain competitive advantage. If this opportunity to set world standards is missed, it may not occur again.
Why, then, are the three authorities convening three separate seminars this month, to launch the adoption proceedings for three entirely different sets of FTL regulations based on apparently unrelated premises and reasoning?
The JAA has not taken into account any new medical or human-factors research before writing a "final draft" for its regulations, which appear to be based on the maximum duty times allowed in those European countries which previously had national regulations. The JAA has rounded up those maxima by about 10%, but given no medically related rationale for doing so.
Canada is changing its rules for one reason only - and it is not scientific, but historical. In making the change, it is acknowledging that it has among the most potentially punishing crew-duty regulations of all nations, which actually have comprehensive FTLs. According to the new draft, however, Canadian aircrew could still be made to work at least 20% longer than the time proposed by the disputed JARs for their European counterparts. Under the new rules, Canadian aircrew could be on duty 365 days a year.
The only hope that the JAA's adoption of its "final" regulations, and Transport Canada's headlong rush towards its own solution, can be slowed lies in the FAA's notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM), to be published later this month, which might at least make the others stop and think.
The FAA's NPRM is the only proposal, which might be based on science rather than history and economics. On 1-2 November in Washington DC, NASA's latest guidelines on aircrew fatigue and its prevention, with all the feedback on its February 1995 paper, will be presented. The FAA has held back its NPRM specifically until this paper was ready. If NASA's guidelines are heeded, it will be virtually impossible for FTLs as lax as Canada's to be drawn up.
The Canadian Airline Pilots Association (CALPA), more cynically, says that the USA is so litigious that the FAA has no choice but to do more than pay lip-service to NASA's research, in case pilot fatigue is cited as a factor in a fatal accident.
If it had wanted to declare the adoption of the final JAR FTL draft, the JAA could have done so months ago. It is clear that they are waiting to see the FAA offering before pronouncing. That is good, surely, because it shows a desire for transatlantic harmony, but it is sad that the harmony is not being achieved by talking.
Ironically, CALPA says that safety is not the strongest card it has in fighting the new duty-time rules: the relatively new US/Canada open-skies treaty is. US carriers are already worried at the prospect that their Canadian competitors will get more work from fewer pilots. So it is not even necessary to leave North America's shores to see why aircrew duty-time regulations must be standardised as far as humanly possible.
It is a pity that the prevention of accidents caused by pilot fatigue seems to come so low down the list of priorities of the world's leading aviation standards-setters whose mandate is to make rules which achieve exactly that.
Source: Flight International
