We recently sat down with Philippe Janvrin, FRM Specialist at Jeppesen, to exchange a few words on risk management approaches for airline crew management.
Philippe, what happens outside of work is of course difficult for an employer to control, but surely the fatigue risk associated with the work schedule itself—the roster—should be possible to eliminate, right?
-Well... It's not quite that easy. The business model of an operator may involve a lot of night operations. Regardless of how that work is arranged, it will be associated with higher fatigue risk compared to work performed during the day. Humans are predisposed to sleep well at night and maintain wakefulness during the day.
Are you saying it is impossible to do anything about the risk, then, without changing the business model?
-No. You can still manage risk as best as possible within the constraints of the business model. The operator should schedule in the 'least bad' way, ensuring, for example, that sleep debt does not accumulate unnecessarily, acclimatization does not negatively impact the most challenging flights, and long periods of wakefulness are avoided where they matter most. However, roster-induced fatigue risk will still be higher for a night-time operator than for a day-time one.
Some operators use bio-mathematical models to manage risk by defining certain cut-off points, which they won't schedule beyond, such as using the KSS scale. Can you comment on that approach?
-It is a simple and transparent way of dealing with it, but it is suboptimal. The cut-off approach assumes flights better than the cut-off are essentially risk-free, and all flights worse than the cut-off are highly concerning. Bio-mathematical models have the advantage of providing predictions on a granular, continuous scale—why not use it? A much better approach is to recognize that all flights carry some level of fatigue risk and use the models to quantify that risk—from very small to very high. Then, reduce the overall risk the airline is exposed to when planning the crew. It will be 30-50 times more effective.
Thank you, Philippe. I'm adding two links below for those who like to read more.
Inspection vs Process Control: link.
Best Practice Control throughout...: link.
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