When I work too many hours I get tired, and when I’m tired I make mistakes. Fortunately, the worst that happens is that I churn out gibberish. If I fall asleep at my desk it’s a shock for the cleaner, but there isn’t too far to fall.
Imagine I was an air traffic controller, responsible for a sky full of aircraft criss-crossing one another’s flight paths at altitude separations of 1,000 feet, nose to tail in air-traffic terms – flying perhaps one minute apart, at several hundred miles per hour – and changing height as they come into land or depart a major airport.
This is precisely the situation in the US, where seven incidents of air traffic controllers falling asleep on the job or otherwise vacating the control desk (in one case the controller on duty was watching a movie) have been reported in the last two months – six since late March and four in the past ten days.
Eight controllers and their managers are currently suspended and the head of the US air traffic control service – part of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) – resigned last week.
There is scarcely a need to review the rights and wrongs of a pizza and movie night or a sleepover in an air traffic control room. However, people can and do fall asleep unintentionally.
It happens to drivers at the wheel. It happens when people are over-tired. It happens when people have worked too-long hours. It happens when sleep is disrupted. It should never happen to an air traffic controller.
The incidents occurred in Knoxville, Tennessee, at Reagan National airport in Washington, in Texas, in Seattle, in Nevada, in Miami and most recently (on Sunday) in Cleveland, Ohio. That is coast to coast. I think we can say it must be down to more than individual sloppiness and irresponsibility.
Thomas Anthony, a former controller and director of the aviation safety and security programme at the University of Southern California, has the most likely answer. It is the shift patterns.
Anthony was quoted in The Guardian as blaming the “rattler shift” which requires US air traffic controllers to perform five days’ work in just four days. He says: “I know from my own experience that by the end of that rattler shift you are in the state of a zombie.”
But this must be a recent problem, surely? It seems not – Anthony was the author of an article warning of the dangers of the rattler shift in US magazine Aero Safety World in March 2009.
In fact, the shift system goes back at least to the 1980s when Anthony, himself, worked it – and is so called because of its tendency to “double back and bite those who work it”.
Controllers were and are “regularly” scheduled to work with only three or four hours sleep, Anthony reported in Aero Safety World. He referred to a crash at Lexington, Kentucky, in 2006 in which 49 passengers and crew died. The controller was found to have been working after having just two hours sleep. The aircraft was on the wrong runway.
Anthony describes the shift system as “not characteristic of a safety culture”. This is putting it mildly. In the last two hours of a rattler shift, he writes: “You hope there is enough staffing that the supervisor can bury you on a low activity position.”
So sleeping in the air traffic control room is primarily about shift patterns and staffing levels. As an emergency measure, the FAA has introduced an extra hour of rest between shifts and approved the appointment of a second controller at 27 airports where only one previously worked the night shift.
Remember that next time you are filling out your APIS information for the US Department of Homeland Security. But don’t imagine this is exclusively a US problem. It’s certainly enough to make you consider the case against night-time landings and take offs…