Fatigue Risk Management News Flash – February 2020
Widerøe Exploring CrewAlert TOD Data Collection
Widerøe, the largest regional airline in Scandinavia with over 400 daily flights, and their main hub in Bodø near
the beautiful archipelago of Lofoten in Norway, has recently been one of the early adopters harvesting fatigue data using the CrewAlert TOD app from Jeppesen.
“During the end of 2019 we have been surveying our operation using CrewAlert TOD, by letting the crew regularly score themselves on the Karolinska sleepiness scale during duty hours,” says Gøril Volden Berg, Fatigue Risk Manager at Widerøe. “We quickly collected several thousands of self-assessments that provided great insights into experienced fatigue levels, with minimal effort for the crew. The app, and the platform for analysis, is a fantastic complement to using only bio-mathematical models and fatigue reports.”
“CrewAlert TOD is designed to securely and easily collect actual sleepiness levels and ’marry them up’ with rostering aspects to investigate operator-specific root causes of schedule-driven fatigue risk,” says Tomas Klemets, head of Scheduling Safety at Jeppesen. “CrewAlert TOD is built for being operationalised, integrates with Jeppesen Concert, and is available for both iOS and Android.”
Are you content with only looking at your ’few-and-far-between’ fatigue reports and predictions out of a fatigue model? Or are you also interested in learning more about, and perhaps continuously monitoring, the real actuals experienced by your crew and the rostering aspects behind them? Welcome to contact us here for more details
How to Travel the World Without Jetlag
Are you curious about the science behind jetlag and the ways of best managing it? Jeppesen has put together an article about the prevention and mitigation of jetlag when traveling eastwards. For a more in-depth study, check out this classic study by Eastman/Burgess from 2009.
Flightlog and CrewAlert Pro now Compatible
CrewAlert, in the hands of over 50,000 crew world-wide and the go-to app for predicting and managing crew fatigue with the Boeing Alertness Model built-in, is now also being sent rosters from Flightlog – a popular app with pilots for importing/holding their roster data and logging their flights, as well as a wide range of other features – now with seamless integration with CrewAlert Pro.
Planning Analytics and generating improvement ideas
The crew pairing process, where flights in the time table are put together into work blocks for crew, is a very central part of the overall crew management process with a huge impact on crew efficiency and costs as well as robustness and crew fatigue risk.
We recently ran into Mattias Lindqvist, a Jeppesen product manager for many years and the ‘thought-leader’ for the Jeppesen Crew Pairing solution being used by 80+ different airlines world-wide. We took the opportunity to pose a few questions:
Mattias, the Jeppesen Crew Pairing product has been around for quite some time – what would you say the most significant developments have been in recent years?
– I would actually claim that some of the more dramatic and valuable 
advancements in pairing optimization have come in recent years – as a result of long-term research efforts. Performance improvements, through parallelisation and usage of multi-core architectures, have opened up for new ways of using crew pairing for more advanced analytics and long term planning. One example is on-the-fly re-timing of the flight schedule, with small adjustments of some 5-15 minutes while preserving aircraft feasibility, for ironing out the ‘wrinkles’ in the flight schedule which creates those golden opportunities for crew connections that otherwise would be untapped potential. Doing that, during the normal optimization of everything else, was an amazing step forward, and can deliver some 1-3% additional crew efficiency. And add to this the bio-mathematical fatigue models and robustness models to be taken into account, also simultaneously – and you understand why I get excited.
What trends have you observed in the customer base regarding their needs and usage more recently?
– I think more and more operators are going beyond the obvious use-case for our pairing solution, the production planning. We now see operators increasingly using our solutions for long-term planning as well as for decision support in what I refer to as planning analytics. Planning analytics is about supporting the strategic decisions regarding the flight schedule, overall crew establishment and structure, even the rules used for planning. This is not only about checking the consequences of ideas by quantifying them on real data with real production systems, which of course is very valuable in itself, but is about generating the ideas for improvement using the solution capabilities to quickly re-model, re-configure, optimize and quantify – more proactively. This is extremely valuable work which we would like to support in an even better way going forward. Rave, our modelling language, plays a key part here, in tandem with the optimization technology.
What tricks do you have up your sleeve for the coming years?
– I need to be careful here and not reveal too much, but I can safely say we are putting efforts into improved teaming of crew – addressing even better crew well-being and operational robustness. We are also investigating how to best use more detailed external sources of information in the optimization, such as online ticket prices for positioning flights. Other parts include tighter integration with surrounding processes for flight scheduling, aircraft routing and rostering, and of course supporting the analytics work I talked about earlier. For the existing customer base, these are all things that will be discussed at CDP in Gothenburg in May.
Please find more information about the Jeppesen Crew Pairing solution here, including a contact form. For studying-up more on RAVE and the value of good decision support, please take a look at this PDF.
Mattias works from the Jeppesen Gothenburg office in western Sweden. In his spare time he engages a lot in skiing and sailing, but what you really should watch out for is challenging him in a game of squash.
Meet up with Jeppesen
FEB 25-26: FRM Training Course, Gothenburg
MAR 16-19: Managing Fatigue 2020, Fremantle
MAR 31-APR 1: Flight Operational Forum Norway, Oslo
APR 20-22: AGIFORS, Istanbul
MAY 12-13: FRM Training Course, Montreal
MAY 12-13: The 25th annual Crew Developer Partners Conference (CDP), Gothenburg
jeppesen.com/frm
+46 31 720 81 00
Send us an Email
Widerøe Exploring CrewAlert TOD Data Collection
Widerøe, the largest regional airline in Scandinavia with over 400 daily flights, and their main hub in Bodø near the beautiful archipelago of Lofoten in Norway, has recently been one of the early adopters harvesting fatigue data using the CrewAlert TOD app from Jeppesen.
“During the end of 2019 we have been surveying our operation using CrewAlert TOD, by letting the crew regularly score themselves on the Karolinska sleepiness scale during duty hours,” says Gøril Volden Berg, Fatigue Risk Manager at Widerøe. “We quickly collected several thousands of self-assessments that provided great insights into experienced fatigue levels, with minimal effort for the crew. The app, and the platform for analysis, is a fantastic complement to using only bio-mathematical models and fatigue reports.”
“CrewAlert TOD is designed to securely and easily collect actual sleepiness levels and ’marry them up’ with rostering aspects to investigate operator-specific root causes of schedule-driven fatigue risk,” says Tomas Klemets, head of Scheduling Safety at Jeppesen. “CrewAlert TOD is built for being operationalised, integrates with Jeppesen Concert, and is available for both iOS and Android.”
Are you content with only looking at your ’few-and-far-between’ fatigue reports and predictions out of a fatigue model? Or are you also interested in learning more about, and perhaps continuously monitoring, the real actuals experienced by your crew and the rostering aspects behind them? Welcome to contact us here for more details
How to Travel the World Without Jetlag
Are you curious about the science behind jetlag and the ways of best managing it? Jeppesen has put together an article about the prevention and mitigation of jetlag when traveling eastwards. For a more in-depth study, check out this classic study by Eastman/Burgess from 2009.
Flightlog and CrewAlert Pro now Compatible
CrewAlert, in the hands of over 50,000 crew world-wide and the go-to app for predicting and managing crew fatigue with the Boeing Alertness Model built-in, is now also being sent rosters from Flightlog – a popular app with pilots for importing/holding their roster data and logging their flights, as well as a wide range of other features – now with seamless integration with CrewAlert Pro.
Planning Analytics and generating improvement ideas
The crew pairing process, where flights in the time table are put together into work blocks for crew, is a very central part of the overall crew management process with a huge impact on crew efficiency and costs as well as robustness and crew fatigue risk.
We recently ran into Mattias Lindqvist, a Jeppesen product manager for many years and the ‘thought-leader’ for the Jeppesen Crew Pairing solution being used by 80+ different airlines world-wide. We took the opportunity to pose a few questions:
Mattias, the Jeppesen Crew Pairing product has been around for quite some time – what would you say the most significant developments have been in recent years?
– I would actually claim that some of the more dramatic and valuable advancements in pairing optimization have come in recent years – as a result of long-term research efforts. Performance improvements, through parallelisation and usage of multi-core architectures, have opened up for new ways of using crew pairing for more advanced analytics and long term planning. One example is on-the-fly re-timing of the flight schedule, with small adjustments of some 5-15 minutes while preserving aircraft feasibility, for ironing out the ‘wrinkles’ in the flight schedule which creates those golden opportunities for crew connections that otherwise would be untapped potential. Doing that, during the normal optimization of everything else, was an amazing step forward, and can deliver some 1-3% additional crew efficiency. And add to this the bio-mathematical fatigue models and robustness models to be taken into account, also simultaneously – and you understand why I get excited.
What trends have you observed in the customer base regarding their needs and usage more recently?
– I think more and more operators are going beyond the obvious use-case for our pairing solution, the production planning. We now see operators increasingly using our solutions for long-term planning as well as for decision support in what I refer to as planning analytics. Planning analytics is about supporting the strategic decisions regarding the flight schedule, overall crew establishment and structure, even the rules used for planning. This is not only about checking the consequences of ideas by quantifying them on real data with real production systems, which of course is very valuable in itself, but is about generating the ideas for improvement using the solution capabilities to quickly re-model, re-configure, optimize and quantify – more proactively. This is extremely valuable work which we would like to support in an even better way going forward. Rave, our modelling language, plays a key part here, in tandem with the optimization technology.
What tricks do you have up your sleeve for the coming years?
– I need to be careful here and not reveal too much, but I can safely say we are putting efforts into improved teaming of crew – addressing even better crew well-being and operational robustness. We are also investigating how to best use more detailed external sources of information in the optimization, such as online ticket prices for positioning flights. Other parts include tighter integration with surrounding processes for flight scheduling, aircraft routing and rostering, and of course supporting the analytics work I talked about earlier. For the existing customer base, these are all things that will be discussed at CDP in Gothenburg in May.
Please find more information about the Jeppesen Crew Pairing solution here, including a contact form. For studying-up more on RAVE and the value of good decision support, please take a look at this PDF. Mattias works from the Jeppesen Gothenburg office in western Sweden. In his spare time he engages a lot in skiing and sailing, but what you really should watch out for is challenging him in a game of squash.
Meet up with Jeppesen
FEB 25-26: FRM Training Course, Gothenburg
MAR 16-19: Managing Fatigue 2020, Fremantle
MAR 31-APR 1: Flight Operational Forum Norway, Oslo
APR 20-22: AGIFORS, Istanbul
MAY 12-13: FRM Training Course, Montreal
MAY 12-13: The 25th annual Crew Developer Partners Conference (CDP), Gothenburg
| jeppesen.com/frm | +46 31 720 81 00 | Send us an Email |