Assessing Flight Crew Fatigue under Extra Augmented Crew Schedule Using a Multimodality Approach

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the question of how to reduce the risk of viral infection for international airline pilots without increasing the risk of fatigue was a novel and urgent theoretical and practical problem, which had never been encountered in the world civil aviation industry. A new scheduling method implemented by the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) is the extra augmented crew (EAC) schedule, which avoids crew layover in another country on international flights by extending the maximum duty time and adding two additional crew members to such long-haul flights. In this study, a multi-day flight crew fatigue assessment was conducted to evaluate the impact of EAC flight. We recruited 71 pilots as participants, and their fatigue during EAC flights was measured using a multimodality approach integrating a subjective fatigue report, a psychomotor vigilance task, sleep monitoring, and biomathematical model predictions. The results showed that the subjective fatigue level increased during duty time compared to off-duty time, but still with acceptable levels of under 7, as measured by the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale; objective secondary task performance, as measured by the classic psychomotor vigilance task, showed no differences; pilots were able to get around 6 h of sleep, although they slept less during duty time compared to off-duty time. Model fitting using the FAID biomathematical model of fatigue confirmed that the EAC scheduling was compliant with the FAID tolerance level 91.3% of the time. The results suggest that the EAC flight created some moderate level of increased fatigue but no severe fatigue to cross-continent long-haul flight crews. This research can inform current and future scheduling and fatigue risk control during the pandemic or for future time-sensitive periods.