Fatigue is one of the most important factors in overall operational safety. It’s so important that most aviation safety management systems adopt additional and specific measures to combat fatigue. Fatigue risk management includes:
In short, fatigue risk management plans span nearly every area of your SMS.
Why is fatigue highlighted? When employees are tired, they tend to be:
In high-risk industries like aviation, employees need to be in optimal mental shape to be prepared to respond to danger. Here are ways to incorporate fatigue risk management into your SMS.
Your hazard reporting system is the cornerstone of the continuous improvement of your SMS. Likewise, gathering data about fatigue issues is one of your best weapons to assess how well your organization is mitigating fatigue-related issues.
Perhaps the best way to use fatigue risk management in your hazard reporting system is to develop a custom Fatigue Reporting Form to use as a part of your hazard reporting process. This form can be electronic or physical, depending on your resources.
Your Fatigue Reporting form should include all relevant details of fatigue problems, such as:
Gathering all of this data in a reporting form allows for significant and accurate data mining in the future.
Because fatigue risk management is an integral part of any aviation service provider’s risk management strategy, you should incorporate your fatigue management strategy into your Safety Policy.
Due to pressure, norms, or other cultural issues, employees may be reluctant to report fatigue issues. To address this, you should ensure that you have:
You might also include other helpful training materials in your Safety Policy regarding what fatigue is and what it looks like.
Your Safety Assurance process involves many activities that help you ensure that your SMS is functioning as designed. Many of these activities mean ongoing monitoring.
You should have various classifications when that you can assign to safety issues, and in your classification tree you should have several types of classifications for fatigue. For example, you might have the following fatigue classifications:
This will allow you to flag issues as being related to fatigue for later data mining and generating safety charts for fatigue. Viewing fatigue charts over periods of time allows you to:
Ideally, you will see:
To practice fatigue risk management in your Safety Risk Management process, you need to implement fatigue risk control measures. Some examples of fatigue controls are:
As you monitor your fatigue performance, you will probably need to update controls or add new controls. You know controls are working when you have a consistent number of fatigue reports that are reported proactively.
Last updated October 2024.