Air traffic controllers are still working schedules known as "rattlers" that make it likely they'll get little or no sleep before overnight shifts, more than three years after a series of incidents involving controllers sleeping on the job, according to a government-sponsored report released Friday.
The report by the National Research Council also expressed concern about the effectiveness of the Federal Aviation Administration's program to prevent its 15,000 controllers from suffering fatigue on the job.
The committee stressed its concern that controllers are still working schedules that cram five eight-hour work shifts into four 24-hour periods. The schedules are popular with controllers because at the end of last shift they have 80 hours off before returning to work the next week. But controllers also call the shifts "rattlers" because they "turn around and bite back."
An example of the kind of schedule that alarmed the report's authors begins with two consecutive day shifts ending at 10 p.m. followed by two consecutive morning shifts beginning at 7 a.m. The controller gets off work at 3 p.m. after the second morning shift and returns to work at about 11 p.m. the same day for an overnight shift — the fifth and last shift of the workweek.
When factoring in commute times and the difficulty people have sleeping during the day when the human body's circadian rhythms are "promoting wakefulness," controllers are "unlikely to log a substantial amount of sleep, if any, before the final midnight shift," the report said.
"From a fatigue and safety perspective, this scheduling is questionable and the committee was astonished to find that it is still allowed under current regulations," the report said. The combination of "acute sleep loss" while working overnight hours when circadian rhythms are at their lowest ebb and people most crave sleep "increases the risk for fatigue and for associated errors and accidents," the report said.
FAA officials didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
The National Air Traffic Controllers Association defended the scheduling, citing the 2009 study that hasn't been publicly released. The union said in a statement that NASA's research showed that "with proper rest periods," the rattler "actually produced less periods of fatigue risk to the overall schedule."
— The Associated Press