The annual safety review records a third consecutive year of falling serious incident rates across commercial operations. It also contains the sharpest language on crew fatigue that the authors have used in a decade.
The headline numbers
Serious incidents per million departures fell again, continuing a trend that now spans three reporting years. Runway excursions, historically the largest single category, declined for the fourth year running, which the report attributes to better landing performance monitoring and to the wider adoption of stabilised-approach criteria that trigger a go-around earlier.
Ground damage remains the most frequent category by count, though the great majority of events cause no injury and only minor aircraft damage.
Fatigue reporting is up, and that is complicated
Voluntary fatigue reports rose by a large margin. The report is careful to state that a rise in reporting is not, by itself, evidence of a rise in fatigue: a healthy reporting culture produces more reports, and several operators have actively encouraged submissions.
But the authors go further than usual. They note that the increase is concentrated in specific roster patterns — late-finish duties followed by early starts, and consecutive night duties at the regulatory limit — and that the concentration is inconsistent with a pure reporting-culture explanation.
The pattern in the data is not random with respect to roster construction. That is the finding, and it is the one operators should act on.
Recommendations
Four recommendations are directed at operators:
- Review rosters that repeatedly generate reports, rather than reviewing individual reports in isolation.
- Publish internal fatigue data to crews, so that reporting is visibly connected to change.
- Treat standby duty as duty for the purposes of fatigue modelling, which several operators still do not.
- Audit the practical availability of the fatigue-related removal-from-duty process, as opposed to its existence on paper.
The fourth is the pointed one. Nearly every operator has a process allowing a crew member to declare unfit for duty due to fatigue. The report suggests that in some organisations the process exists but is understood by crews to carry a career cost, and that where this is true the reported fatigue numbers understate the position substantially.
If any of the issues raised in this report affect you professionally, most operators and national bodies run confidential reporting and support lines.
