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Bold ideas presented at AGIFORS
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| The AGIFORS Crew Management Meeting was held at the end of May in Santiago de Chile, co-hosted by LATAM and with Boeing as one of the gold sponsors. One of the highlights from the event, at least according to this newsletter, was the presentation given by Tomas Gustafsson (above photo courtesy to Aditi Kumari, Indigo) on the FTL Effectiveness quantification work recently done in collaboration with our partners.
The presentation went further than the four chapters published so far, by also revealing a first estimate of the remaining improvement potential in the current EASA FTLs: 18% higher crew efficiency with identical risk, or 16% reduced risk with identical crew efficiency (or a combination of the two).
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Worrying fatigue survey results for European pilots
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| ECA, the European Cockpit Association, just recently published survey results that convey considerable concern over the FRM-situation in Europe. More than 75% of the 6500 responding pilots had experienced at least one uncontrolled microsleep in the past four weeks when going into the busy summer season this year. More than 25% of the pilots reported 5 or more microsleeps in the four-week period. You will find the full survey report via this link.
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| The savings an operator can achieve, or the extra costs to avoid, when it comes to reducing fatigue risk most effectively, spring from the crew pairing and roster construction phases. In these two phases of the crew management process, the context of each and every flight is decided, i.e. the work/rest history leading in to those flights. That context will predict the amount of wakefulness, prior sleep debt and circadian disruption that crew will need to deal with in addition to the flight duty itself. Did you know that more than 90% of the planned context typically remains unchanged throughout the operation?
Crew pairing and roster planning is done by industry-strength optimizers for all but the smallest operators. But how do these optimizers work? What are the complexities involved, and how come they are still improving year after year despite being around for over 30 years now? Back by popular demand is the article where Professor Dag Wedelin, in simple terms, explains optimization for airline crew planning and how it started for Jeppesen, as well as sharing his favourite Avocado recipe. You will find the story via this link. Enjoy!
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Learn about the beginnings of fatigue models
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Did you know that Alexander Borbély not that long ago published a paper called 'The two-process model of sleep regulation: Beginnings and outlook'? The paper recaps the research and series of events that led to the modelling present in the fatigue models used within aviation. From the paper:
The two-process model serves as a major conceptual framework in sleep science. Although dating back more than four decades, it has not lost its relevance for research today. Retracing its origins, I describe how animal experiments aimed at exploring the oscillators driving the circadian sleep–wake rhythm led to the recognition of gradients of sleep states within the daily sleep period. Advances in signal analysis revealed that the level of slow-wave activity in non-rapid eye movement sleep electroencephalogram is high at the beginning of the 12-light period and then declines. After sleep deprivation, the level of... (Read the full article here.)
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Survival should be the rule, not the exception.
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Carl Sagan is attributed the quote "Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception." Even though this is quite true in nature, it shouldn't be true when it comes to our spare time. Many of us in office work can plan how we spend our time off. We may plan for a barbeque, a hike, playing tennis, helping our kids with homework, or visiting friends. We can often plan many days out in time, or even weeks. We can do so, as we are quite certain about our spare time. I know for example that I will be off from 5pm every single weekday, and I know all of Saturday and Sunday will be off as well - whichever week I look at.
For pilots and cabin crew, the situation is very different. Work hours change constantly, and crew often don't even know where in the world they will be on a given day. Once their roster is published, which is perhaps some 14 days in advance but often shorter, they will be provided a 'promise' by the organisation about where their spare time is located in time. With that promise, crew can then (but over a quite short time period) plan for their personal activities. Those plans are what we often label 'life', in work-life balance.
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In the coming weeks, Jeppesen will be rolling out a new metric for our Concert customers. The metric is called Spare Time Survival Ratio (STSR) and quantifies, day by day, how many of the 'promised' minutes of spare time 'survived' when later looking back at the roster after it has been operated. Changed work content, like flying to LHR instead of CDG but staying within the published timings will not kill spare time minutes, but delays or calling out crew on a day off, will. With STSR in place, operators can not only compare the survival ratio between fleets, ranks or bases (or to other operators) but more importantly: track the development over time to quantify improvement or decay.
Roster changes that affect the private life of crew are detrimental to work-life balance and sleep and recovery often becomes the hostage - making it also one of the more important drivers of fatigue risk. Planning with the right buffers is part of the medication, but without a good metric in place, improvement is hard. STRS will be there to help. Spare time is dead, long live spare time!
Welcome to contact us here for a more detailed discussion or a demo of Concert.
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Meet up with our experts:
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| SEP 19-20: Jeppesen Crew and Fleet Optimization Workshop (COW), Gothenburg
SEP 26-28: Digital Aviation Solutions Connect 2023, Barcelona, Spain
NOV 6-8: Jeppesen Users Conference, Washington D.C., USA
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| Missed out on the previous NewsFlash? It's right here.
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