Spain, along with Malta, Ireland and the United Kingdom, are the countries with the most deficient air safety management due to the fatigue of their pilots, according to a report by the consulting firm Baines Simmons released on Monday by the Spanish pilots union Sepla. .
The study, entitled 'Survey on the fatigue of European pilots', has been carried out based on responses from 6,900 pilots from 31 European countries.
The survey shows that airlines registered in those four countries score lower on fatigue management, lack of rest opportunities to prevent cumulative fatigue, and reporting.
In the case of Spain, 63.1% of the pilots indicate that the management of fatigue risks is not well or mostly well managed by the airlines and only 8.5% of them trust the system report on company fatigue, according to Servimedia.
More than 57% of those surveyed show moderate or high concern about the negative consequences on the part of the airline of the refusal to use the figure of the commander's discretion. Likewise, more than 60% of the pilots indicate that they have not had adequate recovery time to avoid accumulated fatigue.
For the president of the Spanish Union of Air Line Pilots (Sepla), Óscar Sanguino, "this European survey on pilot fatigue in the summer is a serious warning to the Spanish aviation industry."
Sanguino believes that "there are airlines that operate in Spain that have not been prepared, despite having been warned by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) to manage the risks of pilot fatigue in periods of high air activity such as summer and this could have affected air safety".
On the other hand, the study shows that fatigue in Europe was already increasing in cabins before the peak summer season. Three out of four pilots experienced at least one microsleep while operating an aircraft in the past 4 weeks, and a quarter reported five or more microsleeps. Additionally, 72.9% of pilots reported having insufficient rest to recover from fatigue between their flights.
