Out of a thousand flight assignments for pilots and cabin crew, it is not unusal for an airline to receive just a handful of fatigue reports. It is well known that fatigue is heavily under-reported for a number of reasons:
The effort for crew associated with submitting a report. It is easy to pospone sumission when tired, and later it may be forgotten, or feel less relevant.
A skepticism from crew regarding the report being actioned and leading to any changes.
Fear of negative consequenses
The convenience sampling that fatigue reports constitute can serve a good purpose for finding and addressing deviations or problems on an individual level, but will not make a good basis for informing decisions about improving rostering practices. The data is simply not representative for the overall population. For really being informative, a broader and more unbiased sample is needed: a fatigue data collection in much larger numbers and where crew can also report feeling just fine.
At Jeppesen, we have developed tools for simple, fast and safe large-scale data collections from crew. These data collections deliver more unbiased and representative data for the actual fatigue risk experienced by the crew population, compared to just a few fatigue reports. Collecting the data is free of charge, provided it can be used also for model improvements and validation in our collaborations with scientists. Please contact us here if you like to know more.