Operators are increasingly using bio-mathematical models (BMMs) integrated into their crew management process (more in this document), suppressing fatigue risk to become as low as reasonably practicable. Even so, a fair amount of fatigue risk, often with the basic level determined by the business model itself, will of course remain in the published and operated rosters. For this reason, it is equally important to prepare crew through training, but also by more direct guidance creating suitable fatigue risk awareness. A precondition for risk reduction, with a given roster content, is risk awareness by the crew.
One way of doing this is of course publishing the rosters so that crew can load them into a personal tool such as CrewAlert Pro where they can get a detailed prediction based on their own personal settings of diurnal type, commute times etc., even prior sleep and wake history.
An even simpler way to create risk awareness is to publish Periods of Elevated Fatigue Risk (PEFR) with the published and updated roster information sent to crew. The picture illustrates one way of doing so in a Gantt representation of the roster by simply placing 'markers' (here coloured amber) during the hours where risk is predicted above a certain level. By having these markers available, even if predicted just for a 'typical crew' by a BMM, crew will have a better chance of thinking twice about how to prepare for that part of the duty period - perhaps making better use of the preceding sleep opportunity and preparing for other mitigations such as caffeine, CRM+ and controlled rest.
Please get in touch with us if you would like to learn more about how to add this capability to your operation.