FRM News Flash – August 2020

Welcome Kalitta Air

 

Kalitta Air, operating an all-freighter fleet of 777F’s, B747-400’s and B767-300ER’s, headquartered in Michigan USA, has chosen Jeppesen Crew Solutions. The recent purchase includes functionality for aircraft routing, pairing construction, lines construction and fatigue risk management.

“We expect the Jeppesen solutions to greatly simplify and shorten our crew planning process and also strengthen our what-if capability adding value to our decision-making processes”, says Pete Sanderlin, Chief Operating Officer, at Kalitta Air. “Our operation is fairly complex, with frequent changes at short notice, therefore quantifying and balancing a large number of ‘considerations’ in parallel is key to us – something that will now be encoded into the objective function of the Jeppesen optimizer”, he continues.

“We are very excited and proud over Kalitta Air selecting Jeppesen for their crew management processes”, says Emmy Jacobson, Flight Operations Sales Director at Boeing Global Services. “The implementation will start in the coming weeks and we look forward to serve Kalitta for many years to come.”

 

Please find more information about the crew solutions referenced above through these links: Jeppesen Aircraft RoutingJeppesen Crew PairingJeppesen Crew RosteringJeppesen Fatigue Risk Management.


Fatigue Risk in Business Aviation

Business aviation operators are facing fatigue risk in a somewhat different way than commercial scheduled operators. Business aviation pilots are normally flying fewer hours than commercial pilots, but they are doing so in a very different environment.

The flights are more susceptible to vibration and turbulence, and in-flight sleep facilities are not as good as on larger aircrafts. In addition, the pilots work irregular hours, face a lot more standby time, and more often lack the benefit of prior experience to lean on regarding flight timings and time zone differences. It is not uncommon that the itineraries are long, span over many different time zones and are also taking off at short notice, making it hard for crew to prepare themselves.

A useful tool for business aviation crew, that greatly simplifies fatigue prediction, prevention and mitigation, is CrewAlert found on the Apple Appstore. CrewAlert Lite (available free of charge) contains the full Boeing Alertness Model and basic functionality, whereas the Pro version (one-time fee of €30) is able to import crew rosters, load sleep history from wearables, as well as provide fatigue awareness information on the Apple Watch. Links are found here: CrewAlert LiteCrewAlert Pro.

In case you are interested in integrating CrewAlert Pro with your operation to automatically provide crew with rosters to be used in the app, please contact us here.


Survey on Well-Being in Aviation, Relating to COVID-19

Trinity College Dublin is researching the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on aviation workers and flight safety. If you work in any kind of ‘safety-critical’ role in the aviation industry, please consider helping out by investing some 12-15 minutes of your time filling out their anonymous survey found through this link. The research is performed by the ‘Lived Experience & Wellbeing Project’ team at the Centre for Innovative Human Systems (CIHS), Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.


Tailored Fatigue Risk Management Strategies

 

There is good scientific consensus about personal management of fatigue. Current guidance includes identifying suitable timings for sleep, seeking up or avoiding bright light, usage of caffeine and a number of other aspects.

Did you know that CrewAlert Pro, the leading app for crew fatigue management, not only contains some of this guidance but also allows for automatically applying it to the roster context? The effectiveness of different sleep/wake and light exposure timings is gauged with BAM – thus producing an ‘optimized’ strategy tailored to the person’s roster and the individual settings for diurnal type and habitual sleep length.

Please find the functionality described in more detail in this document – and perhaps consider using it next time when in doubt as to how to deal with a particularly challenging roster?

CrewAlert Pro is available for iPhone and iPad only and found in the Apple Appstore in most major markets.

 


Don’t Confuse Motion with Effective Action

The fatigue safety action group, or ‘FSAG’, is responsible for monitoring the operation, performing analysis and acting to control crew fatigue risk to an acceptable level. The FRMS is required by the regulators to be data driven and take both operational experience and established science into account.

The nature of human physiology is such that we struggle to cope well with night time work, extended wakefulness and sleep debt – making some flight operations fatiguing by default. But our brains also by design struggle with deeper contemplation and complex analysis. Evolution has favoured a search for the simple and quick solutions, where we spring to action often on the basis of inconclusive data. To truly base decisions on facts and representative data is hard and we are constantly tempted to go with our gut feeling and act on our biased opinions.

It is easy to confuse motion with effective action. Motion, opinions and politics are often loud and very apparent, and may give an impression of problems ‘being dealt with’. However, effective action, springing from insights carefully crafted from representative data, is what quietly creates value, making a real difference to fatigue risk.

Once you are clear on the real cause of fatigue risk, what are the actions you may consider? Please take a look at this document titled ‘Fatigue Risk Prevention and Mitigation – What are the Actions to Consider for the FSAG and the Crew?’. It could be of help in serving as a simple check-list to consult in your work going forward. Enjoy.

 


Meet up with the Jeppesen experts

OCT 26 – Nov 06: Jeppesen Crew Connect 2020 (Users Conference), Online

OCT 29-31: Annual DGSM Meeting, Online

Many events continue to be cancelled or re-scheduled due to COVID-19. Please drop us an email here  instead if you would like to schedule a call or a webex demo.


jeppesen.com/frm +46 31 720 81 00 Send us an Email

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