While airlines in the U.S. and Europe stretched crewmembers to their limits as they struggled to maintain aggressive timetables over the summer, reports of an Ethiopian Airlines captain and first officer both falling asleep during a flight from Khartoum to Addis Ababa served as a timely reminder of the dangers of fatigue in the cockpit. Although the pilots managed to land safely after a cockpit alarm sounded indicating the autopilot disconnected, the August 15 incident could become emblematic of a wider concern voiced by pilot unions around the world.
Ethiopian Airlines suspended the pilots pending the results of the investigation and the captain, an expatriate from Bolivia, has resigned and returned to his home country. Ethiopian Airlines subsequently issued an advisory to all its pilots as a “precautionary measure.”
Whatever findings the investigation into the Ethiopian incident uncovers, the issue of pilot fatigue recently has generated increased scrutiny, particularly in the U.S., where unions have criticized airline hierarchy for failures to address deficient scheduling processes. While the airlines point to a shortage of pilots as one of the reasons flight disruptions skyrocketed over the summer, the Air Line Pilots Association disputes the very existence of a shortage. Others, such as the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) and American Airlines’ bargaining unit, the Allied Pilots Association (APA), don’t dispute that a shortage exists at the regional airline level, but they do point to a failure by major airline management to maintain a fully trained cadre of pilots for the eventual recovery from the Covid crisis.
Both SWAPA and the APA have blamed management for a huge increase in cases where pilots call flight operations to report fatigue, effectively ending their duty day and potentially creating a cascade of out-of-position cockpit crew. In April, SWAPA directors wrote a letter asking Southwest Airlines management to address the problem. SWAPA president Casey Murray told AIN that, since then, the situation hasn’t changed.
“What's driving fatigue is the uncertainty with schedules, the changing of schedules, and the cascading reassignments that occur,” he explained. “Southwest is having a problem connecting pilots to airplanes, and that is causing chaos and disruption. And that leads to fatigue before you reach your [duty time limits]. We also have record involuntary flying being done, meaning pilots being required to fly on off days.”
While Murray conceded that fatigue has plagued pilots flying for network carriers as well, they benefit from departure bank systems that allow for a higher level of predictability in the event of weather disruption, for example. Southwest’s point-to-point network, conversely, makes for far more cases of out-of-position airplanes.
‘It goes back to broken processes,” explained Murray. “We give a lot of grace to our company because of our point-to-point network. So recovery is much more difficult for us. But historically we've always seen certain numbers [of fatigue calls] and when those numbers are up 100, 200, 300, 400 percent, we have to look at it. And a lot of it is our processes that can't keep up with a network that has outgrown the airline.”
Contrary to ALPA’s official position, Murray doesn’t deny a pilot shortage exists and will become worse in the future. Still, he doesn’t blame a lack of pilots for the schedule meltdowns that occurred over the summer and instead takes issue with the airline’s efforts to simply hire more pilots without resolving its scheduling problem.
“We are flying too much with the processes we have in place,” he stressed. “They are hiring, but if the processes aren’t fixed it’s just going to be a cost issue for Southwest.”
Asked to comment on SWAPA’s concerns, Southwest Airlines noted that management and the union regularly consult on fatigue rates in the interest of safety.
“The safety of our customers and employees is always our top priority,” it said in a statement. “Southwest has a robust process in place for pilots to submit fatigue reports and we encourage flight crews to do so. Those reports are reviewed monthly by a joint Southwest/SWAPA team that works collaboratively to address scheduling-related items to improve the pilot experience.”
Murray said management and SWAPA negotiators have begun to address the issue during ongoing contract negotiations and expressed some hope in the fact that the airline has acknowledged a problem exists. In contract talks since six months before the contract’s September 2020 amendable date, the union last month filed for federal mediation to break the two-and-a-half-year deadlock.
Separately, the APA and American Airlines have engaged in talks on a new contract since January 2019, and, according to APA communications committee chairman Dennis Tajer, negotiating a solution to the seemingly intractable issue of clearing pilot training backlogs remains a central point of concern. With nearly 900 pilots retiring from American each year for at least the next four years, the problem will not go away without some fundamental process changes at the airline, he insisted.
“So we can help you accelerate your training, which they're eager to do, but we can't just fix the training problem and then dump all these pilots into a very inefficient system, because you're not fixing your problem,” said Tajer.
Like at Southwest Airlines, American over the summer saw an explosion in the rate of pilot fatigue calls, averaging at least four times the average rate for the period spanning June to August, he reported. Tajer explained that the airline’s fatigue risk management system should mitigate against the need for so many calls and, consequently, schedule interruptions.
“You should not be looking for the fatigue calls to be your indicator that there's a problem,” he said. “A fatigue risk management system analyzes it and says ‘I don’t need human beings to show me this is a problem because it could end in very serious consequences.’ I should be able to look at this and [recognize that] this scheduling program generated something that was unintended. Let’s not do that anymore. And sometimes that happens.
“But we have to fight for that as well…American Airlines management uses what they call an optimizer. It's a scheduling program [and] it puts together trips to do what? To be the least costly schedule possible.”
Unfortunately, weather and human factors usually disrupt what appears like a reasonable plan at the beginning of the month, explained Tajer. “It starts to fall apart,” he said. “They’re recklessly utilizing us on two levels. One, it undermines reliability because we time out or fatigue out, and when we get to the second one, when we fatigue out, that is actually pushing on margins of safety.”