Continuing Global Airspace Radar’s series on fatigue management, inspired by the EASA Air Traffic Controller (ATCO) Fatigue Study, Katarzyna Żmudzińska spoke with Marian Schuver-van Blanken, operational performance lead at MovingDot, and Dr. Maximilian Peukert, human factors specialist at Air Navigation Services of Sweden (LFV). In this second part of the series, they discuss the operational aspects of fatigue management in European ANSPs.
What is fatigue?
One misstep is seeing fatigue exclusively as a rostering issue; it is much broader than that. Fatigue is influenced by numerous operational, organisational, human and social factors. Effective fatigue management is therefore not only about meeting regulatory requirements, but also about understanding fatigue risks within the specific operational context of an ANSP.
Despite being clearly defined by organisations such as ICAO, fatigue remains a complex and multidimensional concept. It can be influenced by how an ATCO spends their breaks, what happens outside working hours and individual factors.
The risk Maximilian sees is that fatigue becomes “the new human error”. When an investigation report identifies human error as the cause of an incident, it often says very little about what actually happened. “The analysis stops where it should actually start,” he observes. Understanding which specific aspect of fatigue played a role would help identify the underlying problem.
Maximilian argues that the industry needs to define fatigue more precisely. Fatigue can take different forms, and the mitigation depends on which aspect is involved. For ANSPs, it would be useful to distinguish between factors such as exhaustion, sleepiness, boredom, emotional saturation and underload.
Fatigue risk management is a shared responsibility and a system-wide issue that should be approached from a broader perspective. Regulators, ATCOs, ANSP management, human resources and unions all have a role to play.
What the data tells us
One of the challenges of fatigue management is the scarcity of quality data. Fatigue reports often have a low base rate and may be filed through the same channels as safety occurrences, making it difficult to gain a clear picture of an ANSP’s fatigue situation.
LFV has conducted fatigue-related studies across the ANSP’s shift set-up. Sleepiness, vigilance and sleep duration were measured throughout each shift. Subjective fatigue remained relatively stable during shifts but tended to increase towards the end, regardless of whether the shift took place during the day or at night. Night shifts showed peak sleepiness during the middle of the night, driven primarily by circadian rhythms. A marked decline in vigilance was also observed midway through night shifts, followed by only partial recovery during the latter half. This data suggests that clockwise shift rotation may be preferable to counter-clockwise rotation when scheduling consecutive shifts.
Fatigue in operations
Marian argues that our industry needs a paradigm shift in the way fatigue is approached. Fatigue management should support safe and effective operations in different conditions, including periods of both high and low workload, day and night shifts, and varying operational environments. Different elements of the ATM system, including traffic complexity, task design and sectorisation, can all influence fatigue. ANSPs should therefore approach ATCO fatigue from a broader operational perspective, rather than focusing primarily on adapting rosters to comply with working-time requirements.
Operational environments can vary between European ANSPs. Much attention is given to periods of high workload, but the opposite situation, underload, is equally important. The key question, Marian says, is: How do we create the conditions to support the human operator to perform at their best?
Working practices within ANSPs are often well established and may have been in place for many years. Organisations should therefore challenge and review their staffing concepts, procedures and working practices to ensure that they still fit operational conditions. This means considering a range of solutions, whether through rostering, seat rotation or, where safe and feasible, adaptations to operational procedures or the ATM system.
What comes next?
For an ANSP to have an effective fatigue management system, it needs sufficient reporting from different sources so that the organisation can learn from the data. Among other measures, this requires cultivating a strong reporting culture, with open discussion about the findings and visible evidence that it can lead to positive change. Technologies such as eye tracking, heart-rate monitoring and temperature measurement could provide objective information about fatigue.
Fatigue management should also extend beyond ATCOs to other operational roles, including Air Traffic Safety Electronics Personnel (ATSEP). These professionals are essential to ATM operations and may also work night shifts or perform on-call duties, making fatigue relevant to them as well.
Looking ahead, the changing demographics of the ATM workforce is another factor to consider. Research suggests that tolerance to shift work can change with age, which may become more and more relevant as the workforce ages. It also remains unclear how automation and AI-supported tools will affect fatigue, including levels of vigilance, underload and the need to re-engage with the system.
