Airline passenger news and views

Nearly a half of Britain's airline pilots suffer significant fatigue, a team from University College of London (UCL) has found, as showed in a report published in early April.

The study, led by Professor Andrew Steptoe and commissioned by the British Airline Pilots' Association (BALPA), has been done on a sample of 492 pilots - two third of them captains - and it has concluded that a 45% were suffering a significant fatigue.

Although the Civil Aviation Authority does allow the pilots to fly discretionary hours to deal with difficult situations, that is supposed to be an exception and not the norm. Instead, 40 per cent of the pilots found themselves  having to fly more than the regulation hours at least twice a month to cope with the volume of flights, according to the UCL study.

Even more worrying is the revelation of that "one in five pilots reported that their abilities were compromised in flight more than once a week."

Jim McAuslan, BALPA general secretary has commented: 'Fatigue amongst British pilots is growing, as this study shows and as our members know. UK pilots have also been giving personal testimonies about their own experience of fatigue and what it feels like to be pushed to the limits. These are enough to make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, even under current fatigue regulations. To force them to fly still more hours is, frankly, reckless.'

This study comes to reinforce what previous ones had already acknowledged. That factors such as irregular sleep and work patterns cause disruption of the circadian rhythm in pilots who fly into discretionary hours, contributing to aircrew fatigue.

Pilot fatigue is an acknowledged contributory risk factor to aircraft accidents. And it was a major element in the Colgan disaster on 12th February 2009, when 50 were killed in an airliner which crash-landed at Buffalo, USA, as the investigations showed.

Fatigue might induce in pilots episodes of "microsleep," a term that defines periods that last from a few seconds to several minutes in which the person fails to respond to outside information. Those episodes often occur when the person's eyes are open. During a microsleep, a pilot might not be aware of flashing alarm lights in the cockpit.

The UCL team's recommendations include better scheduling to take pressure off pilots and more transparent fatigue reporting systems.