Pilot's death brings focus back to fatigue management in industry

The untimely demise of IndiGo pilot Manoj Subramanyam on August 17 due to a sudden cardiac arrest at the Nagpur airport minutes before a flight that he was scheduled to fly has once again brought to light the issue of pilot fatigue despite Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL) rules, raising major concerns about the effectiveness of these regulations.

Pilots across the board have highlighted that airlines are stretching them to the brink, even while they operate within the regulatory framework. Minimum rest, which was an exception, is now being followed by airlines as a standard practice. 

Credit: DH Graphic

Over half a dozen pilots that DH spoke to expressed concerns about work hours, erratic flight schedules and insufficient rest. The most dangerous are red-eye flights that occur within the window of circadian low (WOCL), usually between 2-6 am, when the human body experiences the highest level of fatigue, causing a myriad of health issues amongst the pilots and crew.

“Pilot schedules are generated by softwares that run on numbers and lack the human element and are often designed to maximise duty hours with minimum rest periods,” said Captain Amit Singh, a senior pilot and the founder of the Safety Matters Foundation.

Earlier in August, Air India’s pilot union Indian Pilots Guild wrote to the airline’s head of safety, Henry Donohoe, flagging the increasing fatigue being faced by pilots due to the rosters generated by Jeppesen, the airline’s fully automated rostering system. 

Experts say that India has one of the worst sets of rules on crew FDTL and rest periods in the world. In the United States and Europe, regulations allow pilots to fly for a maximum of 13-14 hours during the day and 9-10 hours for late-night flights. However, India does not differentiate on the basis of day or night time and requires pilots to be on duty for 13 hours within a 24-hour span.

“Duty length has been associated with the risk of accidents,” Singh said. For duties of 13 hours or more, the relative risk of accidents went up straight to 5.5 times, from 1.7 times in case of a 10-hour duty, he explained citing research.

Inadequate rest is a problem: Pilots

According to a 2022 pilot fatigue survey conducted by Safety Matter Foundation, a whopping 66 per cent pilots agreed that they had fallen asleep on the job without consent of the other pilot or experienced micro-sleep episodes, which last a few seconds due to sleep deprivation, while 31 per cent said they had a close call while flying which could have led to an incident attributable to fatigue. 

“Airlines are chasing bottom lines and have no long-term vision. There is an absolute lack of empathy,” a senior pilot in a top Indian airline said. “In fact, airlines are reluctant to hire more pilots and instead make existing pilots work more, how is this fair?” he said.

Experts have underscored the need for scientific intervention to deal with pilot fatigue, and fatigue risk management systems (FRMS) are one way to go about it.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has so far not implemented FRMS and as such no rules have been drafted to manage fatigue under FRMS. “What we have now is a prescriptive flight and duty limitation which does not address the effects of cumulative fatigue,” said Singh.

“Airlines and Employers are not the competent authority to handle this. An emergency independent committee comprising of the regulator, mental health practitioners, senior psychologists and psychiatrists needs to be enacted immediately to once and for all resolve crew stress, fatigue and work anxiety issues imperatively,” said Mark D Martin, chief executive of Martin Consulting.

“We’re trading on thin ice with crew fatigue at the moment; this is a very precarious and delicate matter and it’s time we did it right and did it now,” Martin added.