This week, the NTSB published a report on aviation safety. It included recommendations to the FAA on controller rest, sleep and fatigue issues. The NTSB, in a letter to the FAA and NATCA President Patrick Forrey, says there:

…is clear and compelling evidence that controllers are sometimes operating in a state of fatigue because of their work schedules….The Safety Board is concerned that because of lack of FAA action on this issue, controllers frequently operate in a fatigued state and that action needed now must go beyond simple evaluations….

The FAA should work with NATCA to reduce the potential for controller fatigue by revising controller work scheduling policies and practices to provide rest periods that are long enough for controllers to obtain sufficient restorative sleep and by modifying shift rotations to minimize disrupted sleep patterns, accumulation of sleep debt and decreased cognitive function.

NATCA Communications Director Doug Church says:

Controllers are absolutely more tired than they ever have been and it’s because they are forced to work overtime. This is an understaffed system, and the FAA is lying when it says it’s not.

Speaking of truthfulness: Church says in response to the NTSB recommendations, the FAA claimed controllers’ schedules are negotiated with NATCA and changes must be approved by employees.

This has not been the case since the FAA imposed work rules on the controllers unilaterally in September. The FAA sought to impose management rights: one of them was the ability to control schedules and act without input from controllers and without anything resembling a “negotiation.”

The second incident, the bathroom break, illustrates what can happen in towers when there are not enough controllers, says Church.

In Manchester, N.H., the lone controller certified to handle take offs and landings had to take a bathroom break nearly three hours and 60 takeoffs and landings into his shift. The one person left in the tower was a trainee.

As a result, two airliners were forced to circle for 18 minutes and a plane carrying a set of human lungs for transplant had to delay its takeoff for 10 minutes. Before he left, the controller followed procedures, notifying the FAA’s Boston consolidated terminal radar approach system that he was taking an unscheduled break and Boston monitored the circling airliners. Says Church:

There should never be one person in the tower because it’s not safe. It’s just added proof that the system is stretched to its limits, and these are the type of things that are happening.