Safety Topics

Although largely concerned with the military aspects of prolonged workload effects on aircrew and other personnel, certain topics discussed at a recent conference may have a wider application. One of the subjects dealt with concerned measures used by the USAF School of Aviation Medicine to evaluate crew fatigue in both airborne and ground operations. Self‐ratings have been used for collecting individual data from a large number of personnel. The checklist requires less than a minute to complete and results in a score ranging from 0–20 with lower figures indicating greater fatigue. Scores of 12 or above indicate feelings of alertness, 11 down to 8 moderate fatigue and 7 and below severe fatigue. There is some evidence to suggest that 7 to 4 may indicate performance impairment and below that degraded performance on complex tasks.