NTSB member: On-job-napping could help controllers

[April 26, 2011]  WASHINGTON (AP) -- On-the-job naps should be considered as part of a plan to address fatigue by air traffic controllers, airline pilots and others who work overnight shifts, a National Transportation Safety Board member said Monday.

There is an abundance of scientific studies that show short naps of between 20 and 30 minutes refresh workers suffering fatigue and help them remain alert when they return to their duties, NTSB member Mark Rosekind said. Rosekind is an internationally recognized fatigue expert who formerly worked for NASA and directed a sleep research center at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

"It should be on the table for consideration," Rosekind told reporters at briefing on prevalence of fatigue among transportation workers.

Since late March the Federal Aviation Administration has disclosed at least five cases of controllers falling asleep on the job. In three cases, the controllers were fired. The FAA announced the third and latest action on Monday in an email, saying a controller at Boeing Field in Seattle allegedly fell asleep on the job on Jan. 6 and April 11.

Controllers have been suspended in the other two cases.

The National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union representing FAA's 15,700 controllers, is pressing FAA to allow naps during overnight shifts and during the 20 to 30 minute breaks controllers typically receive every few hours during day shifts. The FAA's longstanding practice has been to forbid any sleeping on the job, even while controllers are taking their break.

An FAA-union working group on fatigue among controllers recommended earlier this year that sleeping be allowed during daytime breaks and in prearranged conditions on overnight shift when there is another controller available to handle the duties of the napping controller.

FAA officials have said the recommendations are being reviewed.

But Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt have also said flatly that they won't sanction on-the-job naps.

"We don't pay people to sleep at work at the FAA," Babbitt told The Associated Press last week. "I don't know anybody that pays anybody to sleep unless you're buying people to have sleep studies."

Over the past four decades, the NTSB has made 190 safety recommendations related to fatigue in all modes of transportation, Rosekind said. The first recommendation regarding fatigue among controllers was in 1981, he said.

There have been five aviation accidents or incidents in which investigators established controllers were suffering from fatigue, he said.

"What is it going to take to get these recommendations enacted?" he said.

Rosekind credited the FAA under Babbitt for proposing the first major overhaul in decades of regulations aimed at preventing fatigue among airline pilots.

However, he noted the proposal doesn't include "controlled napping" by pilots even though FAA-funded research recommended such napping two decades ago. The agency went so far as to draft an advisory to airlines in the mid-1990s that would have allowed them to permit brief naps by one pilot at a time during the flight when the workload is light. But then the recommendation was dropped.

Airlines are required to have at least two pilots in the cockpit.

More recently, FAA drafted, and then set aside, a proposal that would have allowed sleep breaks by controllers during work shifts, according to a 2009 Department of Transportation inspector general's study.

An FAA spokeswoman had no comment on Rosekind's remarks.

[Associated Press; By JOAN LOWY]

Associated Press writer Ray Henry contributed to this story.

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