Fatigue and the million dollar question.

In earlier posts I showed how we are now forced to do 40% more than other countries’ controllers, and I suppose nobody can embrace the idea of knackered controllers. After quite a while experiencing how Aena has tried to squeeze the last drop of blood out of us, after seeing how dozens of colleagues have fallen to illness (including myself), and many others work under the effect of tranquillisers or need pills to sleep at night, one wonders: Where is the limit? Surely there must be a point where it’s unfair to ask an air traffic control specialist to do any more. I feel that most readers will think that they already spend too much time and effort at their own workplace, and I cannot dispute that, but the specific responsibility of an ATCO may require specific working condition guarantees.
Each of us obviously has different capacities. Some of us can withstand less pressure than others. Politically incorrect as it may be, I need to expose what really is an obvious truth: although all controllers have passed their respective tests and have the required skills to do the job, some are better than others. Sometimes very much so. The same applies to resilience, some are tougher than others.
Our’s is a very specialised job. I don’t believe that it’s in any way more important than others in this or other fields. We’re just the end of a large chain. We could do nothing if engineeers, maintenance or cleaning weren’t running properly. Each link of the chain is as important as each other.
On the other hand, it is true that our task is delicate. We "play" directly with thousands of lives every day and therefore have to be serene, rested and show a reasonably positive attitude. We are even compelled by law to refrain from work if we’re not feeling up to it on the given day. An article of the Air Safety Law specifically addresses this (art 34.4 LSA).
The Goverment used a rationale to justify increasing our hours to 1670 (plus 80 of overtime). They said that is what we effectively did a couple of years ago, when so much overtime had been done. That would respond to a certain logic if the conditions had also been maintained. But there are many major changes. Rest within the shift has been reduced from 33 to 25%. Rostering is done only ten days in advance, instead of 90. The over 57’s were unjustifiably axed. So much so, that they were recovered six months later. Pay was reduced between 25 and over 75%, depending on the previous overtime. These and many more were measures that just added to the already extreme pressure upon ATCOs’ shoulders. Admitting a degree of subjectivity, where’s the reasonable limit? It’s very hard to establish an objective yearly limit, but I can focus on daily ones.
My own experience and subjective feeling makes me think that, under a high traffic load, the maximum continuous working limit is about an hour, probably a bit more if you mix tasks (i.e. planning/organising as well as actually controlling).
The Spanish Government has helped me to establish an objective limit, because it has published a Royal Decree on “limits to activity and rests” (RD 1001/2010 5th Aug.) last August. Instead of performing its own studies about fatigue on the workplace it decides to use comparable international legislation, and it chooses FAA (USA) and NATS (UK), as an example, because they are the amongst the most demanding and flexible, in order to allow the ANSPs to satisfy the necessary demand. Obviously, for the rest of my working career I would have preferred less demanding hours, but this has been imposed by Royal Decree, no negotiation. The law imposes a maximum limit of two consecutive hours, literally copied from SRATCOH, the UK regulation. Not only do I personally think that is too much, I’ve also observed that the Spanish ruling has “forgotten” to translate parts relating to enhanced relief, which establishes increased rest, with a maximum of 1h30min continuous activity, for high complexity workplaces, as many in Aena are. Our irresponsible legislators have also added a clause allowing Aena to delay implementation 18 months. In the meantime, we are working daily timetables of no less than three consecutive hours almost every day.
If the Spanish law states that its conditions are those necessary in order to guarantee a fatigue free environment, is it reasonable to assume that if it is not abided by, that guarantee vanishes?
To be honest with you all, I must say that I know nothing about other countries’ regulations on this topic, but I wonder why they have chosen UK and USA. Could it be because those two countries naturally have a lower fatigue load than Spain because they only use one language? Spanish is an official ICAO language and has to be used together with English every day on the radio, meaning constant register changes, and therefore a higher workload.
More about English in a future post. Thanks for reading.