As airlines worldwide grow more concerned about the dangers of pilot fatigue, Cathay Pacific is leading the way by collecting tens of thousands of questionnaires from its pilots in the biggest survey of its kind into the issue.Simon Parry explains why.

It sounds like a scene from the spoof disaster movie Airplane! - but there was nothing in the slightest bit funny about the day two pilots allegedly dozed off at the controls of a Northwest Airlines flight in the US with 149 passengers on board.

Bewildered air traffic controllers spent more than an hour trying to elicit a response from the captain and co-pilot as their Airbus A320 plane drifted 150 miles on autopilot past its destination on a flight from San Diego to Minneapolis.

It was only when a worried flight attendant alerted the pilots by intercom that the cockpit crew addressed what would be described later with magnificent understatement as their "loss of situational awareness". They swiftly did a U-turn to land safely at their destination.

The pilots claimed later they lost track of time while discussing company politics and using their laptops to study rosters. The suspicion lingers, however, that the real explanation for the October 2009 incident is that both pilots were fast asleep.

If they were, they wouldn't have been the first. Twenty months earlier, the pilot and co-pilot of a Go! Airlines flight from Honolulu dozed off and overshot an airport in Hilo, Hawaii, by 30 miles, before circling back and landing safely in February 2008.

For most passengers, in our awe and ignorance of the way modern aircraft work, it seems unthinkable that anyone could doze off at the controls of a commercial plane with millions of dollars of complex machinery and the lives of hundreds of passengers at stake.

But in today's aviation world of automated flying, tight turnarounds, and heavy schedules across time zones for commercial pilots, fatigue has become an increasingly major issue - and not all incidents end with just embarrassment and the prospect of disciplinary action.

In February 2009, 49 people on board died and one person on the ground when a Continental Connection flight crashed near Buffalo in New York State. One of the two pilots had been awake all night before the flight while the other is suspected to have dozed in an airport crew lounge, leaving both fatigued.

In May this year, 158 people died when an Air India Express Boeing 737 approached the Mangalore airport in southern India at the wrong height and angle. Serbian pilot Zlatko Glusica was disorientated after sleeping for most of the flight and data recorders picked up the noise of his snoring before the fatal descent, according to a leaked investigation report.

Flying with fatigue is similar to flying while under the influence of alcohol, research has shown. After 17 hours awake, people have the mental sharpness of a person with a blood alcohol level of 0.05 percent, tests have shown. Extend that to 21 hours and it's like having a blood alcohol reading of 0.08 percent. Both levels are above the legal limit for a pilot on duty.

Fatigue has emerged as one of the biggest issues in global flight safety - and airlines worldwide have been asked by the International Civil Aviation Organisation to draw up Fatigue Risk Management Systems by September 2011 to combat the dangers.

It isn't simply a matter of making sure pilots have long enough breaks between flights. It is the quality of the breaks they have and the amount of sleep they are able to take during those breaks, especially when they cross time zones and have their normal sleep patterns upset.

Pilots based in Hong Kong cross multiple time zones going east and west and have stopovers in parts of the world that have their clocks up to 15 hours apart from Hong Kong's. So the process of figuring out how to ensure pilots are alert and awake has become intensely complicated and scientific.

To address it, Cathay Pacific at the beginning of November began asking every pilot on every flight to fill in a detailed air safety report on fatigue. The two-page forms asks pilots to record in detail how much sleep they have had in the 72 hours before the flight and asks them to record in detail any fatigue-related problems they encounter.

Physical symptoms listed on the forms include rubbing eyes, yawning, frequent blinking, staring blankly, having difficulty keeping eyes open and micro-sleeps. Plots are also asked to record any emotional symptoms of fatigue such as being irritable, grumpy or withdrawn.

Two international experts on aircrew fatigue, Dr David Powell and Dr Mick Spenser, will analyse the tens of thousands of responses expected from pilots over the three-month period that the survey is conducted.

In a circular explaining the survey to its members, the Hong Kong Aircrew Officers Association said the Fatigue Risk Management System required a considerable amount of data to identify and quantify fatigue issues.

While a single "bad" fatigue report might highlight one pilot's problems, a number of reports on the same flight by crew based in the same area would help to identity and understand a potentially problem route or rostering arrangement, pilots were told.

Cathay Pacific has been working closely with the Hong Kong Airline Pilots Association (HKALPA) in organising the survey and working towards an agreed Fatigue Risk Management System for the airline.

A HKALPA spokesman said Hong Kong was now at the very forefront of the global movement to apply advanced science to the issue of pilot fatigue. "With over 7,000 flights operated each month, in excess of 60,000 survey forms could be generated, easily the largest single survey ever undertaken by an airline," the spokesman said.

Although there have been no major fatigue incidents involving Hong Kong airlines, Swedish investigators said they believed fatigue contributed to an accident involving a Cathay Pacific Beoing 747-200 freighter plane which collided with an airport tractor while taxiing at Stockholm in 2007.

The pilots had been awake for 18 to 20 hours at the time of the collision, which left the Boeing 747-200 with heavy damage to one engine, said Swedish investigators who concluded that stress and fatigue may have limited the pilots' concentration abilities.

There has also been speculation that pilot fatigue may have played a role in a series of attempted take-offs from taxiways rather than runways at Hong Kong International Airport, including one under investigation by the Civil Aviation Department involving a Finn Air flight in November.

The HKALPA spokesman said the moves to establish a Fatigue Risk Management System was a significant step forward as airlines had traditionally relied upon Flight Time Limitations to reduce the risk of fatigue among pilots.

"While the Flight Time Limitations are to some extent based on physiological principles, they are a 'one size fits all' approach to fatigue mitigation with significant operational limitations," he explained.

"For example, there are many instances where specific patterns are deemed 'legal', but in practice are shown to be unduly fatiguing for some crew. Similarly, there are instances where a flight is prohibited under the Flight Time Limitations, but makes physiological sense when considering a crewmember's individual circadian (day-to-day) pattern.

"The problem of relying solely on Flight Time Limitations becomes apparent in some companies with complex flight operations and where it is often difficult to track a crewmember's respective home body clock throughout their duty cycle.

"The Fatigue Risk Management System, on the other hand, takes a more holistic approach to fatigue management, looking beyond what is simply legal or not legal, but rather using scientific principles as the basis for managing fatigue within an airline."

The launch of the new system is an extension of a cooperative approach already being taken at Cathay Pacific towards flights where issues involving fatigue arise. Adjustments have been made to two flight patterns in the past year to avoid excessive pilot fatigue.

In the first case, a flight to Dubai via Bombay caused difficulties for pilots who were expected to sleep in Dubai during what would be daytime in Hong Kong, before returning to Hong Kong via Bombay was adjusted to allow pilots to sleep at a better time on the Hong Kong body clock.

A change of flight crews in Riyadh was also introduced on a 12-hour-45-minute flight to Bahrain via Riyadh where crews originally did a longer flight duty in order to avoid an overnight stay in Riyadh, after it was found the pilots could feel tired on the short final Riyadh to Bahrain sector.

The groundbreaking survey now taking place, with its tens of thousands of pilot submissions, may reveal more hidden problems on routes that fall within the rules of Flight Time Limitations but which - because of time zones and other peculiarities - are not ideal for flight safety.

A Cathay Pacific spokeswoman said the response from pilots to the new system had been good and that the ongoing study "may help highlight any area which would need more attention".

"Fatigue is one of the risks that airlines and crew must manage," she said. "Cathay Pacific has decided to implement a Fatigue Risk Management System even before such a program becomes mandatory.

"Fatigue is just one of the many risks that both the airline and the crew must manage," she said. "Seldom, if ever, can risks be entirely eliminated. However, if known and measured, risks can be actively and effectively managed and reduced to an acceptable level."

Although it is so far playing more of an observer role rather than being involved in the drawing up of the Fatigue Risk Management System, the Hong Kong Civil Aviation Department (CAD) is being kept closely informed of the work of HKALPA and Cathay Pacific.

It will be the CAD's responsibility to decide when and how to make fatigue risk measures mandatory in Hong Kong, and a spokeswoman said: "So far the CAD is satisfied with the Hong Kong airlines in respect to their crew fatigue management."

She stressed that the existing Flight Time Limitations provided "a very comprehensive framework for the prevention of crew fatigue" but she added: "With a combination of safety management principles and new knowledge relating to human fatigue and alertness as well as on evolving aircraft capabilities, the concept of fatigue risk management has evolved.

(HK Edition 12/23/2010 page4)