Seeking update to rules on flying time, fatigue
Airline pilot groups are urging Canada’s federal transport ministry to update regulations around fatigue and flying time.
More than 8,000 passenger and cargo pilots have launched SaferSkies.ca, an online campaign to encourage the ministry to publish updated guidelines governing such things as the maximum hours a pilot should be in the air.
“We’re looking to motivate the government to make the right decision and put safety first,” said Capt. Matt Hogan, a board member and pilot with the Air Canada Pilots Association (ACPA) in Toronto.
“We’ve been mired in a multi-year regulatory process since 2010 and we’ve been advocating for an update to the fatigue rules based on accepted scientific evidence.”
The Air Line Pilots Association, International, Unifor and Teamsters Canada also joined in the effort.
But the government is working with industry to develop new rules for flight-crew fatigue and flight-duty time, and it’s getting close to publishing these, according to Aaron McCrorie, director of standards at Transport Canada in Ottawa.
In March, the ministry circulated a notice of intent that outlined “probably about 90 to 95 per cent of what you are going to see in the final rules package,” he said.
The next step, according to McCrorie, is a review by a cabinet committee, before the rules become the regulations for the Canadian airline industry.
Time-of-day rules
One of the areas of concern is exactly when a flight takes off, said Hogan.
“Our biggest concern is in regard to time-of-day sensitivity when it comes to aircraft departing between 5 p.m. and midnight.”
Currently, pilots are allowed to fly long-haul flights at night for 12.5 hours or longer, according to the ACPA. The draft regulations call for 10.5 hours, but this is still not sufficient, said Hogan.
“Our opinion — based upon NASA research — is that a duty period starting after 5 p.m. through midnight should only be 10 hours which would allow for eight-and-a-half hours of flight time actually at the controls.”
The rules will best reflect the reality that bodies react differently at different times, said McCrorie.
“They’re cut and dry, they are going to tell operators the maximum (depending on your start time) of how many hours you can work in a given day.”
A flight that begins in the middle of the night can make it much harder for a pilot to perform at an optimal state, according to experts.
“If you don’t sleep at the same time every day because of your work schedule, then your circadian rhythms becomes out of whack or desynchronized to the external time-givers like the clock, eating time, socializing, awake time and light,” said Clinton Marquardt, a fatigue specialist in Ottawa.
“If you are sleeping at all sorts of times — which often happens in the aviation world — your body then tries to adapt to your new sleeping time and, of course, these people are never sleeping at the same time every day,” he said.
But because internal biological rhythms are no longer synchronized, “your core temperature could drop at some unexpected time if your circadian rhythm is all out of whack,” said Marquardt.
Overnight work can also sap a worker’s energy, according to Carolyn Schur, a sleep expert at HR consulting firm Schur Goode Associates in Saskatoon.
“Because you are working through the night — which is your natural sleep time — working through that time consumes more of your energy than you would if you were working during the day.”
If a flight starts at 2 a.m. as opposed to 2 p.m., it means sleepiness is a natural outcome, she said. “If a pilot is on a flight that is 10 hours, what kind of rest breaks does he or she get in that time?”
The safe thing to do is to allow a nap, said Schur, because “nobody can maintain alertness over the course of 12 hours.”
But ensuring pilots get adequate breaks is easier said than done.
“When you are in an aircraft at 3 a.m., you can’t just pull over to the side of the road and rest,” said Hogan. “When you are dealing with a 24-7 operation like aviation, you have to be mindful of the human physiology and a big portion of fatigue is the fact you have to deal with the reality of your circadian rhythm.”
A possible solution could be mandating airlines to have extra staff on board to spell off a pilot.
“If a pilot’s flying at night, then there’s going to be a reduced work period unless you have augmentation on board, (which are) additional pilots to provide for the fact that you are working through the night,” said Hogan.
Different rules for different pilots
The pilots’ associations are also concerned the ministry doesn’t plan to roll out the new rules for all pilots.
“We want to make sure that the government doesn’t carve out other areas of the industry, particularly cargo and the smaller operators under air taxi,” said Hogan.
“Those individuals, they are human beings; they have the same physiology and they suffer the same effects of fatigue, just like any other pilot would. There should be one level of safety for all Canadians on all the airlines so (they) aren’t competing on safety.”
However, the government said it does not want a one-size-fits-all approach.
“We recognize that (we have) unique operations in this country — medevac, cargo operations — that don’t fit into the usual scheduled model and they may have problems complying with those new prescriptive rules,” said McCrorie.
The ministry plans to introduce fatigue risk management systems for these other airlines, he said, to provide an alternate regulatory scheme that would allow operators to manage fatigue proactively.
For instance, specialty air services such as crop dusters or aerial photographers will not be subject to the same regulations, he said.
“Given their safety record and the nature of their operations, we didn’t feel that they needed the same regulatory requirements as people carrying fare-paying passengers.”
SIDEBAR
Fatigue like drunkenness
Despite efforts to help manage fatigue, sometimes a tired body has other ideas.
“If you are very sleepy, you need to sleep because especially in safety-sensitive situations like (those involving) pilots, you are subject to what are called micro-sleeps: Literally, your body is going to put you to sleep, whether you want to or not,” said Carolyn Schur, a sleep expert at Schur Goode Associates in Saskatoon. “The dangerous thing about it is you don’t have awareness that this is happening.”
When a person starts hitting 17 or 18 hours of wakefulness, a lot of her skills and performance parallel having a blood alcohol level of 0.5 per cent, said Clinton Marquardt, a fatigue specialist based in Ottawa.
Studies have shown “people who were essentially drunk were driving very similar to people who were driving with limited sleep or were awake for too long,” he said.
Fatigue is being recognized as a main reason for airline crashes.
“We’ve identified at Transport Canada our top safety risks and human factors — which include fatigue — as one of our top safety risks,” said Aaron McCrorie, director of standards at Transport Canada in Ottawa. “Our analysis of accidents — both domestically and internationally — have pointed to fatigue as a contributing factor in about 21 accidents since 2004.”
The effect of tiredness in the workplace is becoming more accepted, said Marquardt. “If you think about some of the skills that are required to fly an aircraft well, the first thing (is) you’ve got to be able to make decisions quickly, so reaction time gets affected.”
“Essentially, most of the skills that a pilot needs are sensitive to fatigue, and that’s where the real problems come in,” he said.
A 2004 crash in Ontario saw a pilot wrongly make a decision to fly in a fatigued state, said Marquardt. The pilot experienced icing, the plane was overweight, and it crashed into the icy waters of Lake Erie, causing 10 fatalities.
“In this pilot’s case, he wasn’t extremely fatigued: We calculated he had maybe five hours of sleep the night before this flight,” he said. “The research showed that just one night of five hours or less sleep and you start to see some reliable-performance detriments — things like poor problem-solving, wrong decision-making. As you become a bit more fatigued, the higher cognitive processes start to deteriorate.”
