Fatigue and Well-being in Aviation
Our Aims
Global Aim
The standing aim of any BALPA Safety Conference is to facilitate connections and conversations between the many players in safety within the UK airline industry and beyond. Be that union officials, regulators and safety professionals of all types.
Specific Conference Aim
With this conference BALPA Flight Safety aims to give pilots and airline safety management a better understanding of the pilot fatigue and well-being landscape, especially as we return to the uncertain post pandemic world of increased flight operations.
Our speakers will highlight the nature of fatigue not just as the ultimately subjective issue it is from an individual crew point of view but also from an airline FRM perspective giving us an idea about the capabilities and limitations of the latest technology.
Crew wellbeing as is continually part of our focus at BALPA and we will also bring you some of the leading work in this area in the hope that awareness brings protection for our members and insight for those that control the systems of work.
Moving Forward
It would be naive to think that fatigue and well-being are not serious issues facing our industry. BALPA Flight Safety hopes that by continued learning, both by operators and crews, we can all play our part to make this industry safe and healthy for everyone that benefits from the wonders of modern flight.
We hope that airlines see what is possible in fatigue management from the latest technologies while our members realise the limitations of this technology to individually predict fatigue in such a complex system.
We also hope that we can reduce the high pilot burnout rate through, not just increased awareness by airline management leading to better design of systems of work but also by personal empowerment of crews through understanding and recognition.
The Line Up
BALPA is very grateful to all the panellists who have volunteered to share their wealth of knowledge and experience with us. Our panel have all agreed to help forward our understanding of the world by giving us a solid foundation that we hope will give you the impetus and confidence to explore and evolve further your organisations safety systems.
Dr Paul Jackson
Fresh Air Training Ltd
A Chartered Psychologist specialising in human performance, for the last 20 years Paul has assisted safety-critical organisations to implement fatigue risk management systems. A JAA-TO approved trainer, Paul has written industry guidance on FRMS and delivered fatigue risk management training to safety teams from over 100 airlines and representatives from over 20 regulatory authorities.
As well as delivering training, Paul has recently been involved in a number of high-profile projects:
In 2019-20 he was an expert witness in the criminal case ‘ORR v Renown Consultants’, in which a firm providing welding services to the rail industry was prosecuted by the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) following the deaths of two of its employees in a road traffic accident. This was the first prosecution by the ORR in relation to failures of fatigue management and is a case with wide ranging implications for the management of fatigue both within and outside the rail industry.
In 2019, Paul was contracted by Total Exploration and Production UK to provide expert advisory services on the adequacy of the Fatigue Risk Management Plan prepared for the company’s Shetland Gas Plant (SGP).
Currently, he is working with Network Rail, helping them to develop and establish their Standard on fatigue risk management and roll this out to the organisation’s workforce of over 40,000 employees and suppliers.
Dr Erin Flynn-Evans
Dr. Flynn-Evans leads the NASA Ames Research Center Fatigue Countermeasures Laboratory at NASA Ames Research Center. She holds a PhD from the University of Surrey and an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. Prior to joining NASA, she was an Instructor in Medicine in the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Flynn-Evans has extensive research experience examining the short and long-term effects of sleep loss and circadian misalignment in occupational settings, including among astronauts, airline pilots, physicians and other shift workers.
Arvid Müllern-Aspegren
Arvid is a Scheduling Safety Specialist at Boeing Sweden. He has spent a decade working with various aspects of crew scheduling across dozens of airlines, with the past six years focused on fatigue risk management.
Paul Cullen
Paul is co-founder of the ‘Lived Experience Wellbeing Project’, based in the School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin.
The aim of the ‘Lived Experience Wellbeing Project’ is to further understand how Work-Related Stress is affecting the physical, mental and social wellbeing of aviation workers and how this impacts on Flight Safety. The team have recently collaborated with the Flight Safety Foundation and EASA.
Paul is also an IFALPA accredited accident investigator, an Airbus A321 Captain, previously held the role of Director of Safety & Technical with the Irish Air Line Pilots Association and is currently the Secretary of the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Human Factors (Wellbeing) group.