Addressing Pilot Well-being: A Holistic Perspective on Sleep and Family
The recent Batik Air flight that veered off course due to both pilots falling asleep provides a reminder as to the role that personal lives have on fatigue.
Developed for and by the aviation industry
SAFE has been validated with comprehensive studies conducted since the 1980s for the UK Ministry of Defence and UK Civil Aviation Authority. After its original development, further studies have validated the model’s maturity and extended its usefulness in simulating novel operations such as ultra-long-haul duties and double-crew duties during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Airlines contributing to the original dataset include Air New Zealand, Emirates, Singapore Airlines, Britannia, Lufthansa, JAL, Pan Am, DHL, and British Airways who helped to study short, medium, long and ultra-long haul duties, and cargo operations too.
The first ULR operations in 2001 were made possible by extrapolating the SAFE model and evaluating possible windows of departure. Measurement made during the first flights validated the accuracy of the model and that the operations were safe.
SAFE was used to predict fatigue risks in the preparation of the European regulations for pilots of commercial airlines and business jets and in studies supporting Air Taxis, Emergency Medical Services, Helicopter Search and Rescue operations.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, SAFE was used to predict likely fatigue in extended back-to-back operations, where aircrew were not permitted to disembark at the destination. Duties of up to 36 hours were analysed by extrapolation and confirmed by local CAA analysis.
SAFE can be used to identify operational fatigue hazards, compare schedules, assess fatigue reports, consider productivity and test regulations, with rosters being exportable to our powerful HARVEST analytics module.
SAFE can be used to evaluate the benefit of different fatigue mitigations and consider risk appetite.
Developed specifically for the aviation industry and used by many airlines and regulators world-wide.
Requires few inputs, integrating with crew management systems and supports sectors flown, in-duty rest, split shifts and other workload variables.
Cloud based platform with fast algorithm library available for optimisation or for driving third-party fatigue management modules.
Supports ‘what if’ scenarios. Variables and factors can be altered to prospectively and retrospectively model the effects on fatigue and risk.
Hazards are easy to identify and possible solutions can be evaluated in support of incident and accident investigation.
Fast to deploy and integrate into existing systems, and an inexpensive way of identifying hazards in large datasets.
SAFE calculates predictions of fatigue, alertness, operational risk optimised napping schedules and sleep/wake schedules. Data can be input manually, bulk uploaded or through an API from your rostering and crew solutions software.
SAFE is cloud-based and integrates directly with rostering software. It has capacity to upload tens of thousands of pilot schedules, calculating fatigue scores every 15 minutes throughout each duty period. It identifies fatigue hazards and provides tools to model mitigation strategies.
Download a paper on Automated Collection of Fatigue Ratings at Top of Descent by experts at FRMSc and Air New Zealand as an example of how SAFE and CARE may be used in airline operations.
The recent Batik Air flight that veered off course due to both pilots falling asleep provides a reminder as to the role that personal lives have on fatigue.
The closure of Niger’s airspace earlier this month has further narrowed the corridors available to airline operations. On 7th August 2023, the military junta in Niger announced the closure, citing the possibility of military intervention from neighbouring states. As the closure happened without warning, dozens of aircraft had to be rerouted around the closed airspace