Abstract
Fatigue risk to the pilot has been a deterrent for conducting direct flights longer than 12 h under normal conditions, but such flights were a necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Twenty (N = 20) pilots flying across five humanitarian missions between Brazil and China wore a sleep-tracking device (the Zulu watch), which has been validated for the estimation of sleep timing (sleep onset and offset), duration, efficiency, and sleep score (wake, interrupted, light, or deep Sleep) throughout the mission period. Pilots also reported sleep timing, duration, and subjective quality of their in-flight rest periods using a sleep diary. To our knowledge, this is the first report of commercial pilot sleep behavior during ultra-long-range operations under COVID-19 pandemic conditions. Moreover, these analyses provide an estimate of sleep score during in-flight sleep, which has not been reported previously in the literature.
Highlights
Pilots operating routes that are long-haul (LH), defined as flight duty periods (FDPs) longer than 6 h, or ultra-long-range (ULR), defined as FDPs longer than 12 h, routinely suffer from fatigue due to sleep disruption [1,2,3]
Consumer sleep trackers cannot measure sleep architecture, but many offer a non-equivalent sleep score under the assumption that sleep stages N1 and N2 are comparable to light sleep, slow wave sleep (SWS) is comparable to deep sleep, and rapid eye movement (REM) is its own category [14,15,16,17]
Each mission consisted of 4 FDPs which ranged in length from 11 to 14 h each, 1 turnaround period in China, which lasted between 3 to 6 h without deplaning, and 2 layover periods in Europe which lasted between 20 to 41 h
Summary
Pilots operating routes that are long-haul (LH), defined as flight duty periods (FDPs) longer than 6 h, or ultra-long-range (ULR), defined as FDPs longer than 12 h, routinely suffer from fatigue due to sleep disruption [1,2,3]. Maintaining a home base time zone schedule during ULR rosters may help pilots avoid fatigue related to circadian misalignment or jet lag [2]. The restorative value of sleep, as estimated through subjective fatigue and objective performance, is related to sleep architecture—namely, slow wave sleep (SWS) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep stages [11,12]. Consumer sleep trackers cannot measure sleep architecture, but many offer a non-equivalent sleep score under the assumption that sleep stages N1 and N2 are comparable to light sleep, SWS is comparable to deep sleep, and REM is its own category [14,15,16,17]. Reliable estimation of sleep architecture during LH/ULR rosters, during in-flight sleep, is important toward understanding the quality of sleep across aviation operations. Estimation of sleep scoring is a preliminary step toward that goal
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