Fatigue

The current safety culture and staffing crisis at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has created a situation where controllers are fatigued on a daily basis. The FAA has been given numerous recommendations by both the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) regarding the fatigue experienced by air traffic controllers but has not implemented any changes to error reporting procedures or scheduling procedures known to cause fatigue. A discussion of fatigue issues such as work schedule, overtime and on-the-job training (OJT) will be provided next to give the reader an in depth understanding of how fatigue can affect air traffic control services.

Combining fatigue factors such as rotating shifts, overtime and on-the-job training, a controller on the last hour of their last shift could easily become complacent on position and forget to issue an instruction or miss a problem. In an industry where mistakes mean lives, why would the FAA not complete more research and actually implement changes to the above mentioned issues? Why would the FAA not require collection of fatigue data regarding rotating shifts, overtime and on-the-job training in the report following an accident or near accident in the FAA? There are just no simple answers to these questions, what is painfully apparent is that the FAA has not followed numerous recommendations from the NTSB and OIG regarding how fatigue can contribute to operational errors and has not implemented any solutions to these issues (Office of the Inspector General [OIG], 2009).

The inappropriate/poor arrangement of job design at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) leads to fatigue, sleepiness and stress that all contribute greatly to both the amount of human errors in the aviation system and the severity. Controllers work in an environment where their daily work schedule is constantly changing. The schedule often only allows 8 hours off between shifts and this usually...