It is increasingly acknowledged that hours of work limitations (for example, flight time limitations for pilots and cabin crew, or the European Working Time Directive) are not effective at controlling the risk of fatigue in all circumstances. To ensure that fatigue is controlled, safety critical industries worldwide are being recommended to implement elements of effective Fatigue Risk Management (FRM) alongside prescriptive hours of work limitations.
Our Fatigue Risk Management Diagnostic (FRMD) assesses the extent to which your organisation is exposed to fatigue risk and the maturity and effectiveness of the FRM processes that are already in place. This enables organisations to be better placed to make informed decisions on:
Understanding roster-related fatigue is a key component of effectively managing fatigue risk within your operation. Through using bio-mathematical fatigue models, the impact of the schedule on sleep, wake and circadian factors can be estimated. However, other important factors, such as the impact of roster changes, the effect of standby periods, and the fatigue associated with workload during different tasks, time of day or days of the week, are not effectively captured within a traditional roster analysis.
Part of our suite of Fatigue Risk Management Training and Consultancy Services, our FRM competence development service is ideal for individuals with limited FRM experience. It recognises that safety professionals in an organisation need to develop specialised competence if the organisation’s FRM is to thrive and deliver benefit.
Safety Cases are a means of demonstrating to the regulator that an Alternative Means of Compliance or a specified part of the operation outside of prescriptive limitations is just as, or more, safe as operating within the prescribed regulations.
The scope of safety cases can be wide-ranging, from sleep studies involving significant levels of data collection from a large number of crew, to more simple studies. The size and nature of the safety case depends on the extent of the derogation or alternative means of compliance being sought.
In many parts of the world, regulators have made a process available for Air Operators to apply to work outside the flight and duty time limitations. Airlines have followed this process to enable the operation of ultra-long range (ULR) flights for example, safely within the overall roster without causing excess fatigue levels.
Successful safety case applications must typically demonstrate that safety is improved compared to, or is equivalent to, operations undertaken within the published regulations. They should also be supported by an effective fatigue risk management system (FRMS), and usually require a scientific study. We have assisted many operators to take all the steps necessary to demonstrate that fatigue risk is effectively managed, and to submit successful applications to work outside the prescriptive flight and duty time limitations.
Identifying fatigue in an operation requires multi-faceted data collection from different sources. A key source of information are your front-line personnel. The workforce are both the ‘users’ of your fatigue risk management processes, as you aim to manage their fatigue, and a key source of information to inform and improve your fatigue risk management. Fatigue surveys and focus groups provide a means of collecting these data from across your workforce.
