Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs) being reintegrated back to the operations (ops) rooms and increasing retirement age are buzzing topics these days. Understaffing in Air Traffic Control (ATC) is a battle many parts of the World are fighting right now, keeping in mind its safety-criticality. How far can we go to safely keep enough ATC workforce in place?
I had a chance to speak with Marc Baumgartner – operational ATCO and Centre Supervisor in Geneva Area Control Centre (ACC) for over 25 years. On behalf of the International Federation of Air traffic Controllers’ Associations (IFATCA) he coordinates the SESAR and EASA activities. Marc led the study on behalf of Helvetica and Skyguide on the psycho-cognitive decline due to age for Swiss ATCOs and is associated with the follow-up work of this study.
Air Traffic Controllers are aging in the same way as any other person in the World
With years passing by, our bodies are less and less efficient with recovering our body cells including our brain. This appears as greying hair, forgetting locations or names and being physically slower. Psychocognitive factors have an impact on human performance and when in Switzerland the government decided that the pension retirement age should be increased from 56 to 60 years old, the question came about to assess how this increase could be managed without negatively impacting operational safety or the ATCO`s psychological well-being.
The study used methods like: questionnaires, sleep and fatigue data collection, neuropsychological tests, physiological measurements, and many more. The results showed that age itself has no effect on fatigue and well-being, but has a significant effect on night-shift work tolerance and workload. Fatigue and stress are impacted in combination with other factors.
Moreover, the study measured the speed in which the decline in performance happens and how much effort one needs to achieve an acceptable level of performance. This is the so-called “crunch model”. The main point is that to perform a demanding cognitive task, a young person needs a certain effort and an elderly one needs to put in more cognitive resources in order to achieve an acceptable performance. This potentially leads to a decline in speed of performed tasks.
Mitigating the impacts of aging and making the shift work as human-friendly as possible
Rosters adapted to individual preferences, improvements of break scheduling, individual questionnaires and cognitive tests to analyse chronotype, fatigue and stress levels, reduction of night shifts and working time are a few examples of all the 17 recommendations suggested by the study. These also included peer-reviews to monitor the performance of other colleagues. The outcomes of these reviews could mean adapting the work time to part-time, taking only certain types of roles, i.e. only supervisor shifts or keeping only one endorsement. These enable ANSPs to potentially retain the ATC workload beyond the age of 56 years old.
Besides these suggestions, some ATC centres, in example the ACC in Zurich, took advantage of modern technologies to mitigate the harsh impacts of shift work by adjusting the lightning system in the closed ops room to simulate day-time and night-time lighting.
Shift work is particularly challenging for the body regardless of age. When it comes to working in night shifts, this disrupts the natural circadian rhythm and all the important recovery processes in the body. Moreover, people differ from each other, there are night owls and early birds. Working according to a roster which is against your chronotype, would require additional effort. In May 2024, EASA performed a study, which looked into possible measures of preventing and managing ATCOs’ fatigue. The study came up with 10 recommendations which included improving rosters practices, reporting tools and considering ATCO fatigue in the development of future ATCO supporting tools.
Let’s go a step further and discuss reintegrating already retired ATCOs back to work
An observed phenomenon is that once someone leaves the shift job and starts to sleep again according to the normal circadian rhythm, without the pressure of working during the night, they start operating in a totally different mode. Once somebody gets back to the “normal” rhythm, it takes about 3 months to deprogram the body from a shift worker to a retired person’s rhythm. If they have to then reactivate the shift working pattern, this will require making a lot of extra effort. Moreover, this change would cause extra stress, because that person would enter a new environment, where the technology and tools moved on and are not the same as before. This would mean a necessity to put in a lot of mental effort to achieve an acceptable level of performance. On top of that, comes the change of meal times, which puts the body under additional stress which in certain cases would make the individual suffer, if this individual has retired and after more than 3 months comes back to work.
There’s no simple answer to the question posed in the title of this story, it’s a tricky balance of cognitive, physical, and operational factors. While adapted rosters and flexible working conditions can help extend careers, jumping back in after retirement comes with its own challenges. That said, we now have smarter workforce planning, improved fatigue management and new technologies that can help support aging ATCOs and keep the skies safe.
