In May 2023, Air India released its safety management software, Coruson, and fatigue reduction tool, BAM (Boeing Alertness Model), integrated into the rostering system that airlines use to create and manage pilot schedules. Developed by cloud software company Ideagen, Coruson centralizes, analyzes and reports safety-related data such as incidents, hazards and risk assessments. BAM, jointly developed by Boeing and software company Jeppesen, predicts and manages pilot fatigue by analyzing flight schedules and performance data. In an internal message to employees, Air India CEO Campbell Wilson said the tools are designed to prevent the creation of rosters and combinations that lead to fatigue. The airline also introduced two new digital tools for flight crew. One is the Pilot Sector Report app, which allows pilots to easily submit information on flight performance, incidents and post-flight observations, and DocuNet, a digital management system that makes it easy to store, search and share documents (such as flight manuals, training records and compliance documents).
Despite these measures, the airline was fined by the DGCA in March this year for violating FDTL limits and fatigue management rules. In May this year, Air India Express cabin crew walked out en masse when sick to protest against “mismanagement”. This followed a similar protest by Vistara crew (mostly pilots). Air India and Vistara are currently part of the Tata Group, one of India’s largest conglomerates, which took over from the Indian government in January 2022.
25 Air India Express employees who took sick leave were fired. Other employees were reportedly given an ultimatum. The fired employees were later reinstated by the airline following the intervention of the labour commissioner. About a week earlier, the regional labour commissioner in Delhi had reportedly written to the chairman of the Tata Group, pointing out “flagrant violations of labour laws” and asking him to look into the legitimate concerns of flight attendants. According to CNBC, Vistara employees said their protest was related to a recent pay revision, which reduced pilots’ pay from 70 hours to 40 hours. The protesting co-pilots claimed that the new pay structure would result in a pay cut of almost 57 percent. Under the new terms, they would have to fly up to 76 hours to earn what they used to earn in 70 hours.
To placate pilots and get them to return to work, management assured them they would be paid for “overtime” hours once Vistara was merged with Air India. At the time, two Air India pilots’ unions wrote to the airline’s president, saying the issues were systemic, not isolated. Burnout was also a related issue, with many pilots complaining they were not getting enough rest and were being pushed to their limits.
Captain Singh, a former senior manager at AirAsia, told WIRED that such effects would not only significantly increase the risk of accidents, but also have negative effects on pilots’ health in the long term. Under the 13-hour rule, tail swaps (a quick transfer between different types of aircraft to quickly disembark and take off from another aircraft) would be more frequent, which could further contribute to fatigue. There would also be the rush to acclimatize and, most importantly, land three, four or more flights in a row, which Captain Randhawa described as a “serious energy management challenge.”
In the 2024 Safety Culture Survey conducted by Singh’s Safety Matters Foundation in July, 81% of 530 respondents, mostly medium- to short-haul pilots, said that buffer-less rostering contributes to fatigue. As many as 84% expressed concerns about the speed and direction of shift rotation. “That’s the problem with the new rostering software that operators are introducing,” says a commercial airline pilot who asked to remain anonymous. “They’re optimization devices designed to make pilots work every second of a 13-hour schedule, without giving them a break.” Because buffer-less timetables push pilots to their limits, additional pressures, such as unpredictable weather, can easily overwhelm them.
A wrist-worn fatigue-measuring device could solve this problem, controversially. But that’s not the only problem. A year after much hype about fatigue-management technology, the buzz has pretty much died down. Indigo hasn’t released any updates on the wrist-worn device. Neither Indigo nor Thales Group responded to requests for comment.
