Time-limit proposals split pilots, carriers
Shift reductions urged in bid to battle fatigue
OTTAWA – A new proposal by a government-led study group to toughen the rules for combating pilot fatigue is facing stiff opposition from some industry players.
Transport Canada’s aviation regulatory advisory council will convene next week to review proposals by its pilot fatigue management working group to modernize Canada’s regulations. The working group proposes a cap of 112 hours of flight time in a 28day cycle, down from the current 140 hours. The working group’s co-chairs are also recommending special limits be placed on overnight flying.
The maximum daily flight-duty period should be 13 hours for daytime flying and no more than nine hours for some overnight flights, their proposal states.
Current rules, drafted in 1965 and updated in 1996, permit pilots to fly 14 hours in a 24-hour period. Unlike in other countries, the rules in Canada do not take into account the latest sleep research and do not distinguish between daytime and overnight flying.
The new recommendations have some backing, but are facing strong pushback by air industry associations representing smaller air operators. In their joint dissent, they say a “onesize-fits-all” approach to pilot fatigue rules would have “catastrophic consequences” for their businesses.
The Air Canada Pilots Association, meanwhile, wants the safety rules to be tightened even more in key areas, to harmonize with other jurisdictions, including the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. Areas of concern include the maximum duty period at night, successive overseas flights and cumulative fatigue.
These various groups were members of the working group, but on any matter where consensus was not achieved, co-chairs Dan Adamus, president of the Canada board of the Air Line Pilots Association, and Jacqueline Booth, chief of technical Program Evaluation and Co-ordination in Transport Canada’s civil aviation division, developed a recommendation between them.
The department’s Canadian Aviation Regulation Advisory Council (CARAC) will now consider the cochairs’ proposed regulatory changes, but it will be up to Transport Minister Denis Lebel to table a regulatory proposal for public consultation.
Pressure has mounted on the federal government to update the regulations since 2009, when the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the Montreal-based United Nations civil aviation agency, released new requirements to manage pilot fatigue based on best practices and scientific knowledge.
The Air Canada Pilots Association has longed maintained that Transport Canada’s current flight and duty-time regulations put Canada in violation of ICAO’s standards. The association will now press CARAC to go further than the recommendations of the working group co-chairs.
For example, the pilots’ association wants to see a maximum duty period set for un-acclimatized crew members. Scientific evidence provided to the working group indicated that 24 hours, the typical overseas layover duration, is not sufficient time to achieve two sleeps, according to the Air Canada Pilots Association dissenting report.
The pilots association also notes that the working group report has a provision that permits successive longrange flights crossing multiple time zones with just one night’s rest.
The joint dissent to CARAC by groups representing smaller operators is pushing for a different direction altogether.
The associations argue the “complexity of the proposed new rules, bluntly put, will go beyond the ability of flight crew members to manage in an unscheduled, on-demand pilot self-dispatch environment … While ‘pilots-are-pilots’ as they say, unless the science is unequivocal (i.e. the average human needs eight hours sleep each night), then there must be some recognition that small operators, by virtue of their less-structured operating environment for example, need different rules. The proposals contained in the working group depart from this principle in many very significant ways.”