New FAA research probes flight attendants’ anxiety over insufficient sleep and unsafe performance.
By Wayne Rosenkrans
AeroSafety World, June 2009
(Expanded version of article)
Objective data analyses to be available next year may offer the best chance yet for U.S. airlines, labor unions and regulators to come to terms with why individual cabin crewmembers sometimes work on flights suffering from what they consider severely degraded alertness. Then, mere opinions about the prevalence of fatigue serious enough to jeopardize flight attendant performance of safety-critical duties may carry less weight.
Airline and regulator interest in cabin safety-related studies by fatigue scientists and other specialists has been reflected in presentations at aviation safety conferences in anticipation of the results of th…
