Correctly gauging fatigue risk in your operation, using only fatigue reports and opinions received from the operation, is not an easy task. Crew often need to invest quite some time submitting a fatigue report, which is one of the reasons for under-reporting. But there is also, due to large individual variation, a risk that received fatigue reports mostly reflect outliers, rather than reveal the structural problem you would like to address. And there are no "alertness reports" from crew balancing these outliers; easily leading to applying preventions and mitigations in the wrong places, or for the wrong reasons. Many airlines have too few fatigue reports to be able to accuratetely assess the overall fatigue risk and how it develops over time.
For the above reasons, it is important to complement fatigue reporting with more objective measurements using for example a fatigue model or roster metrics, such as those provided by BAM, and to also regularly collect fatigue data from the operation on actual experienced sleepiness and performance levels.
Jeppesen is offering a fatigue data collection service, where airlines can collect data in a structured way for actual sleep patterns, reaction times and self-assessments of sleepiness using a simple iPhone app called CrewAlert Lite. The app, as well as the service, is provided free of charge (subject to conditions) and is described in greater detail here. Collected data is handled securely, de-identified at-source and respecting the ethical principles in the Declaration of Helsinki governing this type of investigation. So if you are part of an airline FSAG today, and are interested in gathering facts to complement your data on outliers and opinions, please feel free to contact us here for more information on how to start your own data collection. Welcome.
