The Importance Of Fatigue In Air Traffic Control

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Fatigue in air traffic control is one of the largest contributing factors to stress in the control tower. This is mainly due to the fact that air traffic controllers must be fully alert and ready to provide split second instructions to aircraft to avert conflict. If controllers are fatigued they become challenged with impaired cognitive abilities, and are slower to make decisions, ultimately making them more vulnerable to mistakes. Air traffic controller fatigue has been attributed as a factor over the years in a number of accidents, including near misses and runway collisions (Carter, 2011). Throughout the years the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have closely researched the contributing factors behind aviation related accidents that involved pilot and controller error. The common theme that both organizations found was that most of the contributing factors to aviation related accidents involving controllers consisted of: fatigue, stress, and poor training. Once the NTSB and FAA identified these critical areas of failure, they took measures to improve both the scheduling and training of air traffic controllers. For example, as late as 2007, following the investigation into the 2006 crash of Comair Flight 5191 that killed 49 people, the NTSB recommended increasing the number of …show more content…

The system is run from the runways. Runway capacity is finite. You can only put so many airplanes on the ground in a given period of time. If an airline schedules more airplanes than a runway can handle in a certain period of time, nobody can change the laws of physics to make it work out. There will be delays. If a thunderstorm passes over the Atlanta airport it can wipe out all five runways for an hour. Controllers can't get that capacity back. It's gone. You can't push those 151 operations that didn't happen into the next hour (fallows and Brown,

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