Effective fatigue risk management is all about being able to answer these four simple questions:
Where in your operation do you have the highest risk for the next fatigue related incident or accident?
How do you know that?
What do you do about it?
How effective is it?
ICAO guidance stipulates basing a FRMS on data and science; ‘data‐driven decisions based on scientifically valid principles and measurements’. Yet, there are many airlines that in practice run an ‘opinion-driven FRMS’ where the feedback from just a few individuals guides their actions. Fatigue can be highly individual and what occurs during time off may also have a big impact on experienced fatigue during work hours.
For this reason, operators would need to exercise caution when drawing conclusions about roster design when using fatigue reports or feedback from a few SMEs. It may be that data, even if accurate, isn’t representative for the population. Many operators are, unfortunately, acting on information reflecting less than 0.1% of the population, which is not what ICAO meant with ‘data-driven’. (Please find here our popular one-page version of the ICAO guidance visualizing a FRMS.)
However, more and more operators are now working with the ‘bigger picture’, performing structured data collection in larger quantities and taking input from validated science through bio-mathematical models for assessing the entire operation with advanced analytics. Did you know that both large-scale data collection and a broader ’health check’ of your full operation can be done quickly, easily and at minimal costs? Please contact us for more information about this and learn about the power of CrewAlert, BAM and Jeppesen Concert. Find out how your fatigue risk has evolved for each fleet, base, rank over the last five years - and what you can do about it going forward, making a real difference.