What is pilot fatigue, behind the IndiGo flight delays of late?

A scheduled IndiGo flight from Dehradun to Chennai, with an hour layover in Lucknow, originally a four-hour sector, ended up becoming 12 hours long. The main reason for the itinerary getting so stretched was that the captain was exhausted.

According to passenger tweets, the pilot had initially walked in late for his job in Dehradun itself, exhausted and tired. The aircraft was then supposed to take a short detour to Delhi, instead of flying to Chennai, the final destination. Delhi, why?

Because the captain was exhausted, and the replacement crew was in Delhi. However, the aircraft did not have to go to Delhi. The crew was replaced in Lucknow and it flew to Chennai after hours of delay.

'This is a serious profession. Leave all your worries behind,' is written in bold inside a cockpit.

However, pilot fatigue is a problem to reckon with; especially in the light of frequent itinerary changes, flight delays and so on.

Indigo's growth

• India's largest carrier, Indigo, started as a low-cost domestic carrier. Now, after 17 years of its inception, IndiGo is connecting India to a bunch of destinations in the neighbourhood and afar.
• With direct flights to destinations like Istanbul (Turkey), Tbilisi (Georgia) and Almaty (Kazakhstan) and codeshare arrangements with Turkish Airlines, Indigo is each day aiming to reach every corner of the world with low-cost options.
• With its fleet size touching 320, and several hundreds of new aircraft in the pipeline from Airbus, the carrier as of 2021, had around 3,734 pilots on its payroll.
• Now, with such tremendous growth in network and fleet, how proportionate will the growth of crew be, including pilots? Are the airlines doing enough to upgrade their infrastructure to keep up with the expansions?

There have been multiple reports about Indian carriers looking for skilled and experienced pilots, and IndiGo, Air India and Akasa Air are looking to make additions to their fleets. There is a dearth of such professionals for the industry. Covid was a major issue, and the years of the pandemic took a toll on skilling, practice and certification for new joinees.

There were also reports of IndiGo crew on the lookout for new jobs with other airlines because of tough working conditions and the lack of benefits.

What are the requirements

• The thumb rule followed in the aviation industry is to have 10-11 pilots per aircraft. 
• Major Indian carriers, more or less, follow the proportion with slight fluctuations owing to various unforeseen factors.
• Deriving from the data at hand, IndiGo too, looks to keep a healthy number of pilots per flight (11).
• When an airline like IndiGo expands to mid-sized routes on pre-existing single-aisle aircraft, crew and pilots are often interoperable. There is no provision for the crew to rest on 320s and 737s, the main narrowbodies in the Indian sky.
• In such cases, flight fatigue is bound to occur when the crew travel long distances to international destinations, across time zones.

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• According to a pilot survey by the Safety Matters Foundation (2022),
• 66% of pilots admitted to falling asleep in the cockpit without alerting the crew members.
• The same study revealed more than half of Indian pilots suffer from severe daytime sleepiness.
• More than 74% of the pilots in the survey flagged morning departures for such fatigues.
• 31% of the pilots in the survey admitted to having had a close call because of sleepiness in flight.
• 97% of the pilots felt the DGCA is not doing enough to mitigate the risk of pilot fatigue.

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• After evaluating certain aspects relating to flight safety, a mixed bag of factors emerged: like stretched resources, including human resources, morning flights, inadequate resting facilities onboard, etc.

Has the DGCA ensured proper implementation of safety norms?

• We still do remember the suspension of Captain Gaurav Taneja from Air Asia India as he flagged the non-adherence to flying rules for pilots in his airline.
• He pointed out companies employing policies and rules like 'sick leave policy' and dodgy fuel-saving techniques to squeeze the most out of pilots.
• Airlines, in a bid to save money, make dodgy tweaks to existing rules and exploit loopholes.

The profession is already a challenging one, the task of burdening the crew with these conditions can have a direct and detrimental impact on flight safety.

What is flight/pilot fatigue?

• The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) defines flight fatigue/pilot fatigue, as a physiological and psychological state of tiredness and weariness experienced by pilots due to prolonged periods of wakefulness and/or insufficient restorative sleep.
• Flight fatigue can impair cognitive functioning, decision-making abilities, and overall performance, posing risks to flight safety.
• Instances of sleep or fatigue during a flight can lead to errors and non-adherence to the Cockpit Resource Management (CRM), the manual that defines crew responsibilities onboard.
• Having a well-rested mind and body during the take-off and landing of a flight is mandatory for the overall safety of the service.

This sleeping of pilots onboard that we discussed is different from those on long haul or ultra-long haul routes, where one of the pilots after takeoff can rest or sleep at a designated spot while the other pilots look after cruising, leaving at least one pilot at the wheel (yoke in this case).

Mistakes by the crew and human errors account for the highest share of aircraft accident causes, said 2021 data from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

Instances 

An easy Google search about the cases of sleep fatigue-induced crashes or near calls shed light on the frequent prevalence of the problem.

• Ajay Devgan's 2022 film Runway 34 was based on one such case where the Captain, despite drinking alcohol the night before a flight, lands a diverted plane in Thiruvananthapuram with his eyes closed, averting a disaster. According to the NTSB, alcohol intake too is a major contributor to fatigue in pilots.

• In the 2010 crash of Afriqiyah Airways Flight 771, the investigation report identified pilot fatigue as a potential factor behind the disaster. During a go-around at Tripoli airport in Libya, the aircraft, carrying 93 passengers and 11 crew members, crashed, resulting in the loss of all but one person on board.
• On May 22, 2010, Air India Express Flight 812 met a tragic accident during its landing at Mangalore International Airport, India, claiming the lives of 158 people onboard. Later, the investigation revealed that the captain experienced sleepiness during the flight. He regained consciousness prior to the landing, but it was too late. The Air India Chief back then declined the possibility of fatigue as a reason for the accident.
• In August 2022, on a Jaipur- Mumbai, Air India flight, both pilots were reported asleep in their seats before being woken up by Air Traffic Controllers.
• Another incident of flight fatigue is from earlier this year; on June 13, the pilot on a Lucknow-Mumbai IndiGo flight, after repeated attempts to land in Mumbai, took the plane to Udaipur and abandoned it. A fresh crew was brought in to fly the plane back to its destination, Mumbai.

These instances are enough alarms for stakeholders including pilots, crew, passengers, airline operators and government regulators. Insufficient measures against flight fatigue invite disasters, unless proactive action is urgently taken to prevent potential accidents.