Cutting down on air traffic controller fatigue
We’ve been reminded again and again air travel is the safest form of transportation, but a bedrock fact remains: Before we buckle up our seatbelts and streak through the heavens at 700 mph, we would like our pilot to be as adept as Chesley Sullenberger, who landed a U.S. Airways plane on the Hudson River in 2009, and, most importantly, alert and well-rested.
That’s only part of the equation, though. We don’t see them, but air traffic controllers spend long shifts looking at dots advance across screens. Those dots represent planes cruising at various altitudes, taxiing toward or away from terminals, taking off or coming in to land. It’s a stressful job that demands acute concentration. Inattention or fatigue can be deadly – in 2006, 49 people were killed when a commuter jet crashed in Lexington, Ky., after the jet was directed to the wrong runway by a controller who worked all night and only grabbed two hours of sleep in the 24 hours before. No one was killed, but in 2011 two airliners had to land without any assistance at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., because the only controller on duty nodded off.
A report from the Federal Aviation Administration, apparently completed in 2012 but only made available in recent days to the Associated Press and other media outlets, found at least 1 in 5 controllers confessed to having committed significant errors while on duty, with over half pointing to fatigue as the cause of their missteps. The study indicates controllers most prone to succumbing to fatigue were those working nighttime shifts or on six-day schedules.
A spokeswoman for the FAA said the agency “has taken many positive steps to minimize fatigue,” such as allowing for “recuperative breaks” during some shifts based on workload, and requiring two controllers be on duty at night. Nevertheless, there are a host of other recommendations in the report, including that six-day schedules be eliminated.
These recommendations should be taken seriously. Being drowsy on the job can have some dire ramifications, but it’s one thing to put a decimal point in the wrong place and quite another to put a point on the radar in the wrong place.