Sickness absenteeism among flight crews is a pervasive problem disruptive to operations and costly for the employer. According to literature, exposure to certain schedule attributes has been associated with adverse health issues. However, the relationship between schedule characteristics and sickness absenteeism remains unclear. Therefore, the aim of this study is to identify schedule characteristics increasing the odds of sickness absenteeism based on historical data. Here, data records for each flight crew member were obtained from a Dutch low-cost airline in the period between 1 January 2018 and 24 January 2020. Schedule characteristics with an adverse effect on both the circadian and/or social rhythm, as identified in literature, were extracted from the available data, and included in the model. Exploration on these potential harmful schedule attributes was done using two generalised additive models. After adjusting for the socio-demographic and work-related confounding variables, simulations revealed that employees exposed to night shifts, backward, and forward rotations over a thirty-day period were significantly more likely to report sick. Furthermore, employees who flew four sectors showed higher odds to call in sick compared to employees who flew two sectors. Based on the results, it is recommended to schedule either sufficient rest periods after exposure or limit the occurrence of the identified schedule attributes.
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Crew resource management (CRM) training for flight crews is widespread and has been credited with improving aviation safety. As other industries have adopted CRM, they have interpreted CRM in different ways. We sought to understand how industries have adopted CRM, regarding its conceptualisation and evaluation. For this, we conducted a systematic review of CRM studies in theMaritime, Nuclear Power, Oil and Gas, and Air Traffic Control industries. We searched three electronic databases (Web of Science, Science Direct, Scopus) and CRM reviews for papers. We analysed these papers on their goals, scope, levers of change, and evaluation. To synthesise, we compared the analysis results across industries. We found that most CRM programs have the broad goals of improving safety and efficiency. However, there are differences in the scope and levers of change between programs, both within and between industries. Most evaluative studies suffer from methodological weaknesses, and the evaluation does not align with how studies conceptualise CRM. These results challenge the assumption that there is a clear link between CRM training and enhanced safety in the analysed industries. Future CRM research needs to provide a clear conceptualisation—how CRM is expected to improve safety—and select evaluation measures consistent with this.
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Pilot fatigue has been identified as a determinative factor in various safety events, leading to the introduction of Fatigue Risk Management regulations and standards worldwide. The scope of this study was to examine whether event and pilot characteristics recorded in safety investigation reports were associated with fatigue when the latter was stated as a contributing/causal factor. The sample consisted of 296 reports published by various investigation authorities and referred to safety events occurred between 1990 and 2014. The researchers conducted frequency analyses and Chi-square / Fisher Exact tests as a means to examine possible associations. Flight crew fatigue was found as a cause in 8.8% of the reports and was more frequently present in occurrences during evening and night operations, take-off, climbing, approach and landing phases, and Control Flight into Terrain and Runway Excursion eventualities. No significant differences were found regarding the year of occurrence, aircraft age, weight and type (jet, propeller, rotary), flight type (Commercial Air Transport and other), operation type (passenger and non-passenger) and event severity. Regarding the pilot characteristics, the more the hours on duty the higher the frequency of events where fatigue was recognised as a factor. No association was detected between the frequency of fatigue related events and pilots’ age, hours of experience in the respective aircraft type and in total, and, surprisingly, regarding sleeping and resting hours before reporting for duty. The findings only partially confirmed associations of fatigue with the operational, event, aircraft and flight crew characteristics included in this study, and showed that fatigue had contributed to (serious) incidents and accidents with about the same frequency. The results suggest a consideration of quality of flight crew sleep/rest before reporting on duty.
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We are at the start of the research group ‘Entrepreneurship in Transition’,which is an initiative of Hanze University of Applied Sciences andAlfa-college to conduct research and valorise knowledge about therelationship between entrepreneurship and education, entrepreneurialsuccess factors, retail and succession.In the research group, students of vocational education (mbo), university ofapplied sciences (hbo), staff and other partners involved, study the dynamics ofentrepreneurship in the northern region of the Netherlands. Our goal is to contribute to a sustainable social, cultural and economic healthy region through research and practises. An important parameter for the research group is the concept of explorative space. In short is this a space where people and organisations are encouraged and welcomed to explore their potentialities and find ways to actualise them. This booklet is written as a metaphorical travel journey, it shows how the research group will move in the years to come. I present the crew, the vision and the ways we work. The last months have been busy, since we have already prepared and started this shared journey. During our preparations, we have made initial choices about travel companions , potential routes, visions on the trip, and the work ahead. Naturally, theteam will make alterations, variations, and harmonisations over the course of the trip.
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Fatigued pilots are prone to experience cognitive disorders that degrade their performance and adherence to high safety standards. In light of the current challenging context in aviation, we report the early phase of our ongoing project on the re-evaluation of human factors research for flight crew. Our motivation stems from the need for aviation organisations to develop decision support systems for operational aviation settings, able to feed-in in the organisations’ fatigue risk management efforts. Key criteria to this end are the need for the least possible intrusiveness and the added information value for a safety system. Departing from the problems in compliance-focused fatigue risk management and the intrusive nature of clinical studies, we report a neuroscientific methodology able to yield markers that can be easily integrated in a decision support system at the operational level. Reporting the preliminary phase of our live project, we evaluate the tools suitable for the development of a system that tracks subtle pilot states, such as drowsiness and micro-sleep episodes.
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Design educators and industry partners are critical knowledge managers and co-drivers of change, and design graduate and post-graduate students can act as catalysts for new ideas, energy, and perspectives. In this article, we will explore how design advances industry development through the lens of a longitudinal inquiry into activities carried out as part of a Dutch design faculty-industry collaboration. We analyze seventy-five (75) Master of Science (MSc) thesis outcomes and seven (7) Doctorate (PhD) thesis outcomes (five in progress) to identify ways that design activities have influenced advances in the Dutch aviation industry over time. Based on these findings, we then introduce an Industry Design Framework, which organizes the industry/design relationship as a three-layered system. This novel approach to engaging industry in design research and design education has immediate practical value and theoretical significance, both in the present and for future research. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2019.07.003 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-de-lille-8039372/
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This research paper looks at a selection of science-fiction films and its connection with the progression of the use of television, telephone and print media. It also analyzes statistical data obtained from a questionnaire conducted by the research group regarding the use of communication media.
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Market competition and global financial uncertainty have been the principal drivers that impel aviation companies to proceed to budget cuts, including decreases in salary and work force levels, in order to ensure viability and sustainability. Under the concepts of Maslow and Herzberg’s motivation theories, the current paper unfolds the influence of employment cost fluctuations on an aviation organization’s accidents attributed to human error. This study exploited financial and accident data over a period of 13 years, and explored if rates of accidents attributed to human errors of flight, maintenance and ramp crews, correlate with the average employment expenditures (N=13). In addition, the study took into account the relationship between average task load (ratio of flying hours per employee) and accident rates related to human error since task load, as part of total workload, is a constraint of modern complex systems. The results revealed strong correlations amongst accident rates linked to human error with the average employment costs and task load. The use of more specific data per aviation organizational department and professional group may further validate the results of this study. Organizations that seek to explore the 2 association between human error and employment budget and task load might appropriately adapt the approach proposed.
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This paper proposes an amendment of the classification of safety events based on their controllability and contemplates the potential of an event to escalate into higher severity classes. It considers (1) whether the end-user had the opportunity to intervene into the course of an event, (2) the level of end-user familiarity with the situation, and (3) the positive or negative effects of end-user intervention against expected outcomes. To examine its potential, we applied the refined classification to 296 aviation safety investigation reports. The results suggested that pilots controlled only three-quarters of the occurrences, more than three-thirds of the controlled cases regarded fairly unfamiliar situations, and the flight crews succeeded to mitigate the possible negative consequences of events in about 71% of the cases. Further statistical tests showed that the controllability-related characteristics of events had not significantly changed over time, and they varied across regions, aircraft, operational and event characteristics, as well as when fatigue had contributed to the occurrences. Overall, the findings demonstrated the value of using the controllability classification before considering the actual outcomes of events as means to support the identification of system resilience and successes. The classification can also be embedded in voluntary reporting systems to allow end-users to express the degree of each of the controllability characteristics so that management can monitor them over time and perform internal and external benchmarking. The mandatory reports concerned, the classification could function as a decision-making parameter for prioritising incident investigations.
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What is known in scientific literature at this point in time about the effects of the measures against the transmission of the coronavirus and what is the meaning of this for the organisers of events?
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