What matters to the fatigue risk on an individual flight is what 'leads in' to that situation for the crew. For example, it will matter how much sleep crew obtained in the 24 hours prior, 48 hours prior and perhaps also in the full week prior to that operation. Similarly, the time awake prior to the flight will also be of importance. We refer to this as the 'flight context'; what took placeprior to a flight, from a multitude of different aspects. It may be the amount of duty time touching the physiological night, number of landings or duration of sleep opportunity; keeping in mind that the closer in time that it happened, the greater effect it will have on the state of the crew. If crew had a night duty a couple of weeks prior to the departure of the flight in question, it would have a much smaller impact on the state of the crew, compared to such a duty being placed on the night before.
A bio-mathematical model will of course take the flight context into account when predicting alertness for the flight - but it will do so only for aspects that the scientific community has been able to quantify and validate from collected data. Knowing that the scientists are short of representative data, and recognising that fatigue models are not perfect today, it is best practice to also track the development of additional metrics over time, calculated from the crew roster. Some airlines simply use for this what they have available; number of rule exceedances, remaining margin to maximum FDP, monthly block hours etc. The disadvantage with such an approach is that these traditional metrics do not reflect the flight context; what really leads up to each flight. The amount of block hours in June has of course little or no bearing on the fatigue risk of a flight departing on, say, the 5th of June. You will need what we refer to as Assignment Centric Performance Indicators (ACPIs).
Jeppesen Concert is a cloud-based self-service analytics solution designed for quantifying and monitoring, not only fatigue risk using a leading fatigue model (BAM), but also a wide range of truly meaningful SPIs reflecting the flight context for all flights in your operation. Concert allows for powerful data exploration and analytics and also automatically detect trends in your data, alerting you accordingly.
Please consider contacting us here to receive more information on how to get up and running with a Concert trial. Concert can be used with your current crew management solution and does not require any local installation. In as little as a week from now, you could be analysing trends of a large range of meaningful SPIs over the last few years for your operation; comparing planned to published. And published to operated. Welcome!
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