Jetblue And The Physiology Of Profit
JetBlue received a reprimand last week from the FAA for encouraging pilots to fly beyond their flight and duty time, as part of a company experiment to study pilot fatigue.
Pilots flew as many as 11 hours a day on more than 50 flights in May 2005, to examine various states of human alertness. The 29 pilots in the study wore motion detectors on their wrists. In addition, hand-held devices issuing prompts and recorded response speed were used. In its defense, JetBlue said a third pilot was always on board in case of problems.
FAA issued a letter of correction for the experiment, but stopped short of slapping a fine on the airline. There’s a lot more to this story than meets the eye.
When the brain trust at JetBlue got the inspiration for enhancing profits by making the pilot team work a little harder, they figured it was a good idea to first back up any initiative with hard scientific “facts”. Managers tend to suspect that pilots keep additional stamina in reserve and would be willing to press their noses harder against the grindstone if given sufficient incentive.
At an airline’s top executive echelon, it isn’t hard to make low-key overtures to local FAA officials who work with airline management on day-to-day matters. The FAA prides itself on being data-driven, so the agency readily agreed that all it needed was empirical evidence to assure it that pilots can indeed take on more work.
Not surprisingly, there was little or no opposition within the company. After all, any measure to enhance profitability is a good career move. The management team was relentlessly indefatigable in their pursuit of corporate efficiencies. Thus, a small-scale trial blossomed into a tiresome attempt at scientifically based exploitation.
JetBlue hired consultant experts who outfitted 29 pilots with devices to measure alertness while on duty. Of course, to see how that would become degraded over lengthier working hours, those pilots had to be scheduled to fly longer hours.
In fact, two or three hours longer than the maximum hours allowed by the present regulations was the frontier being explored. The ultimate objective was to demonstrate indisputably that an extended working day was not at all deleterious to a pilot’s health or performance. It was a little like filling in the squares before drawing the boxes.
There’s no denying that the issue of chronic fatigue limits on crew scheduling is of paramount importance to the industry. But regardless of how much you “train” a pilot, he or she will have personal traits. Fatigue thresholds, fortitude and fitness levels are just three of those “f word” shortfalls. Apart from the individual’s physical characteristics, stamina and personal goals, there are the intangibles of familial associations and mental well-being.
Meanwhile, jury-rigging an 18 month trial, even with the participation and imprimatur of acknowledged industrial fatigue expert Mark Rosekind, would inevitably produce a contentious result.
The decision makers at JetBlue were simplistically seeking commercial aviation’s Philosopher’s Stone. When it comes to changing hidebound personnel aspects of airline operations, it can be more about physiognomy than physiology.
When the FAA’s Head Office got wise to JetBlue’s trial via the whisper gallery, the policy-makers were a trifle incensed, and JetBlue was asked to cease and desist. “When we became aware that JetBlue had operated some domestic flights outside the standard rules, we immediately investigated and took corrective action,” said James Ballough, head of flight standards for the agency. Mr. Ballough says officials now are “confident that JetBlue’s pilots are back flying to the FAA’s rules.” Another high-ranking FAA policy maker expressed his displeasure more bluntly: “We don’t allow experiments with passengers on board, period.”
The FAA verbally reprimanded the airline, issuing it “a letter of correction”. The FAA did not impose any fines or take any other action. JetBlue’s chagrin was more evident than its remorse. A JetBlue spokesperson chalked the situation up to “a miscommunication,” although, she said, in retrospect the company understands “we have to widen the circle of consultation.” JetBlue intoned that: “Safety is our bedrock value. It is the fundamental promise we make, and keep, to our customers and crew members.”
Rosekind’s consulting firm, Alertness Solutions, sold the data-gathering idea to regulators at the FAA’s district office in New York. That office is responsible for overseeing JetBlue’s operations and monitoring its 1,500 pilots and it expressed support for the plan. Alertness Solutions calls itself “a scientific consulting firm that translates knowledge of sleep, circadian rhythms, alertness, and performance into practical strategies that improve safety and productivity in our 24-hour society.”
Pilots were equipped with pedometer-like motion detectors on their wrists to measure activity, and hand-held devices that issued random prompts and recorded response times. Twenty-nine JetBlue pilots and a few backup aviators participated in more than 50 data-gathering flights during May 2005. The assumption was that local FAA officials had the power to approve the trial under supplemental flight rules.
Those rules stipulate that airlines flying longer flights must have at least one extra pilot on board so that no single pilot will fly more than eight hours in total. However, for the JetBlue trial, even though each flight had a third pilot on board, the original crews stayed at the controls for up to 11 hours a day. The flaw in the safety logic is glaring.
It’s a fascinating concept to instrument a pilot with the intent to import his fatigue-related activity into a mensurated database. Time and motion studies of a piloting task overlook the important and invisibly abstract cerebral functions of situational awareness, decision-making and the ability to recognize, assimilate, analyze and respond to external stimuli. These processes are liable to the interdiction of chronic fatigue.
The FAA already said earlier this year that “power naps are out” for pilots. That tends to leave pilots who are not flying international long-haul routes perpetually somewhere between a seat and a windscreen – and never with any intervening eyelids. “Dropping off” has officially dropped off their agenda.
Surprisingly, the NTSB hasn’t jumped up and down, even though it has also been kept out of the loop. Richard Healing, who stepped down from the board last year, says JetBlue’s “arguments may have some merit,” but “they need to be validated as part of a comprehensive study” on pilot fatigue. The existing eight hour rule is over 40 years old, so it’s a reasonable proposition to review it at least.
A spokesman for the Airline Pilots Association, which represents pilots at most major airlines, said that while pilot fatigue is an important issue, “there are other ways to look at this … We would not recommend any of our members to participate in a single experiment at a single carrier.”
A more pragmatic view on working hours might want to work back from the most challenging part of the average flight.
It’s long been acknowledged that the vast majority of accidents occur in the approach and landing phase – and that’s at the end of a flight when the piloting team is least likely to be at their peak. Once weather, serviceability and remaining fuel are factored in, the approach and landing could become the standard climactic event for any flight.
There are other factors, too. ICAO has pushed through the concept of MPL (the Multi-crew Pilots Licence). It’s already in the process of being adopted by South Africa and Australia. Under its rules, the second man in a pilot team might have as little as 170 hours of flight training, with the vast majority of that being in a range of capable (and other much less capable) flight simulators. And of course, MPL also serves as a costs-driven economy measure.
In the end, JetBlue did get its data, slated for publication by the end of the year. Whether or not these results will change the status quo is unfathomable.