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Fatigue in Airline Pilots - page 1
Keywords: Fatigue Pilots Airline Psychology
By Wriggley on 29/04/2010
Level: Bachelor Honours Degree (BA, BEng, BSc etc)
Page Number: 1 of 4 pages: 1 2 3 4To what extent might fatigue among airline pilots compromise safety?
“Sleeping is no art: for its sake one must stay awake all day” as Friedrich Nietzsche stated but has the working day become too long? Is pushing ourselves against our natural Circadian rhythms by jumping between time zones causing us to become fatigued and sleep deprived putting ourselves and others at risk? In the following essay some of the issues surrounding fatigue will be looked at in further detail such as the effects of accumulated sleep debt and what may increase the likelihood of fatigue.
In 2008 there were 147 crashes where fatalities were reported resulting in 876 deaths (Federal Aviation Authority, 2009). Although this represents the second lowest year for fatalities since records began, this does not represent an even reduction in all causes of these kinds of accident. In the past year, April 2008 to April 2009, there was a 2.4% increase in the category of Pilot Error - Human Error with a small decrease in the other Pilot error categories, Pilot Error - Weather, Pilot Error - Mechanical and Pilot Error - Other, of between 0.2% and 0.3% (A.C.R.O., 2009). This may seem like an insignificantly small number but with new aircraft routes opening all the time this will be an ever increasing number of incidents. It is also documented that for every accident there is an estimated 300 near miss or for a better term near hit incidents (Office of National Statistics, 1995).
There may be many different factors that come in to play when considering what has caused these incidents. It may be that fatigue was the main contributing factor but other things may play their part everything from illness and injury, drug use prescribed and otherwise, working relationships or even something simple has the pilot eaten recently enough. There can even be simple human error, for example when interpreting instructions from Air Traffic Control as in the case of the Kegworth Air Disaster where pilots made assumptions based on previous experience which were incorrect. These led to them shutting down the remaining working engine and resulted in a catastrophic crash resulting in the loss of many lives (Owen, 2001).
In recent months an aircraft overshot Minneapolis Airport by more than 150 miles and the aircraft was out of radio contact for 78 minutes before circling back and returning to its intended destination. The pilots themselves have
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