The Restless Flight Attendant

Flight Attendant Fatigue: A Quantitative Review of Flight Attendant Comments Avers, Katrina; Nei, Darin; King, S. Janine; et al. U.S. Federal Aviation Administration Civil Aerospace Medical Institute (CAMI). Report no. DOT/FAA/AM-11/16. 23 pp. October 2011. Available on the Internet at . Fatigue has emerged as an important safety issue among airplane crews, including cabin crewmembers, who are the “last line of defense” in some accident scenarios. In 2005, at the direction of the U.S. Congress, CAMI partnered with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Ames Research Center’s Fatigue Countermeasures Group to review research literature and examine typical flight attendant schedules to assess whether schedules might encourage performance-undermining fatigue. That study’s report concluded that “some degree of fatigue-related performance decrements were likely under the current regulations and suggested six areas of research that would facilitate understanding and government-industry decision making.” It offered recommendations in six areas. Congress then asked CAMI to conduct follow-up studies in each research recommendation area. The first area involved conducting a survey of field operations — that is, what flight attendants said about their working conditions (see ASW, 10/10, p. 52, for the methodology employed); the findings were published in a second report. This latest report analyzes the flight attendants’ comments quantitatively. “Overall, responses to the survey indicated that flight attendants consider fatigue to be a significant issue,” this report says. “According to reports from the surveyed flight attendants, most have experienced fatigue while at work and agree that it is both a common experience and a safety risk.” For the content analysis, researchers subdivided the survey responses into eight broad categories: scheduling, health, airline and airline policy, job performance and satisfaction, meals, comments about the survey itself, workload, and break facilities. The 1,933 paper surveys and 1,506 online surveys that included comments were reduced to a more manageable number. “To ensure the sample of comments was representative of the overall general survey respondents, two demographic items [qualified] eligible surveys: (1) type of operation (low-cost, regional, network), and (2) flight attendant seniority level (junior, mid, senior),” the report says. “Two hundred surveys were randomly The Restless Flight Attendant