Study Shows Fatigue Increases Speed, Mistakes

According to a new study, lack of sleep may affect the attentiveness of airport baggage screeners -- and, in turn, could compromise passenger safety.

Dr. Nayantara Santhi, Research Fellow at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, kept 31 healthy people awake for 36 hours straight and asked them to perform a visual search task every two hours. The longer they were awake, the quicker they searched -- and the more mistakes they made, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

"These results suggest that safety and performance in socially critical low target prevalence search tasks may be especially vulnerable to the detrimental effects of sleep deprivation," Santhi said.

 The National Air Traffic Controller's Association has long pointed to a lack of sleep causing problems in the tower, recently made worse by increasing staffing shortages.

Just this week, as ANN reported, the NATCA said 1,000 controllers have left the field in the last two years, leaving those that remain fatigued. Fatigue was cited as a reason for mistakes leading to near-misses.

"This is a concern because of fatigue. We have less people working, which means we are going to have more people working positions longer and traffic longer," said NATCA spokesman Dan Horwitz.

The Federal Aviation Administration has been aware of the importance of sleep for decades. So much so, it made specific rules that are strictly adhered to.

"Regulations limiting flight time and pilot rest have been in place since the 1940s. Current FAA regulations impose an eight-hour limit for a pilot's flight time during a 24-hour period, provided the pilot has had at least eight continuous hours of rest during the 24-hour period. If a pilot's actual rest is less than nine hours in the 24-hour period, the next rest period must be lengthened to provide for the appropriate compensatory rest," according to the agency.

According to the American Association of Sleep Medicine, not sleeping well may lead to a number of problems. People not getting enough sleep are more likely to have a depressed mood, attention and memory problems, excessive daytime sleepiness, more nighttime falls, and use more over-the-counter or prescription sleep aids.

In addition, recent studies associate lack of sleep with serious health problems such as an increased risk of obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

FMI: www.apss.org, www.faa.gov, www.natca.org