NTSB Recommends More Sleep for Weary Air Traffic Controllers

LEXINGTON, Ky. _ As a result of the crash of Comair Flight 5191, the National Transportation Safety Board wants air-traffic controllers to get more sleep.

In a series of recommendations released Tuesday, the NTSB called on the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Air Traffic Controllers Association to change scheduling policies and to increase awareness of the dangers of sleep deprivation among controllers. The NTSB also recommended that controllers receive annual training.

The recommendations are not an official finding of cause for the Aug. 27 crash, which killed 49 of the 50 people on board. The board is expected to rule on a probable cause sometime this summer.

A union official said the recommendations should open a conversation with the FAAthat the controllers have long wanted to have. But he noted that the cause of controller fatigue isn’t just sleep, it’s staffing.

The FAA requires overtime from controllers, and it doesn’t allow them to call in sick if, for example, they have difficulty sleeping because of a sick child, said Doug Church, a spokesman for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

To make changes in schedules, the agency and the union would have to agree to contract changes, said Laura Brown, an FAA spokeswoman. In addition, current requirements are adequate for sleep, she said.

“We require eight hours between shifts and expect that employees will take advantage of that rest period to get completely rested and ready to assume their duties when they report for work,” Brown said.

Contract negotiations between the union and the FAA broke down last year. Since September, controllers and others have been working under FAA-structured work rules instead.

The NTSB has no authority to enforce its recommendations. They would have to be implemented voluntarily by the FAA.

At the time of the accident, the one controller on duty had his back to the runway. He cleared the early-morning flight to take off without noticing that the pilots had positioned the aircraft on an unlit runway designed for smaller planes.

The controller told investigators that as a result of his schedule, he had slept for only two hours of the past 24.

“Such limited sleep can degrade alertness, vigilance and judgment,” the NTSB recommendation said.

The average amount of sleep a controller gets before overnight shifts, which the Lexington controller was working the morning of the crash, is 2.3 hours, according to the NTSB.

To prevent similar accidents, the NTSB wants:

_The FAA and the union to revise controller work-schedule policies to provide for adequate rest periods that minimize disrupted sleep patterns.

_A training program to make controllers and schedulers aware of the problems created by fatigue and its causes.

_Controllers to complete training in resource management. The training would help controllers be vigilant about safety and set priorities, such as checking the location of a plane before clearing it for takeoff.

The recommendations are the second set issued as a result of the Comair crash. In December, the NTSB asked the FAA to require pilots to cross-check their instruments to ensure they’re taking off from the correct runway, and to require airlines to provide specific guidance to pilots about taking off from unlit runways in the dark.

In a March 13 letter, the FAA said it would act on them.

Paul Czysz, a retired aeronautics professor at St. Louis University, said that while more sleep might have helped the air-traffic controller prevent the accident, a second person on duty would have been better.

The FAA has acknowledged that two controllers, rather than one, should have been on duty. The tower, managed by the FAA, apparently had violated staffing policies for months. The FAA says Blue Grass Airport now has two controllers on duty during the overnight shift.

In the recommendations released Tuesday, the NTSB noted that many controllers work rotating schedules, as the controller on duty the morning of Aug. 27 did. In those cases, the controllers work two afternoon-to-evening shifts, two morning-to-afternoon shifts and one midnight-to-morning shift in a week. The schedule gives the controller a longer weekend and provides for recovery after an overnight shift, the report noted, but it interferes with natural sleep-wake cycles.

“The probability is very high that controllers are sometimes working when they are significantly fatigued and committing fundamental errors directly as a result of being fatigued,” the recommendation said.

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(c) 2007, Lexington Herald-Leader (Lexington, Ky.).

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