FTL rules – Flight Time Limitations – the new European rules on Flight Time Limitations (FTL) became applicable throughout Europe. With the overarching aim of preventing air crew fatigue from posing a threat to flight safety, two key objectives of these new rules were to achieve a harmonised regulation across Europe, and to improve flight safety standards through a better anticipation and management of fatigue risks at the level of individual airlines.
ECA – the European Cockpit Association – had accompanied the development of these new ‘EASA FTL’ rules over several years – stressing the need for truly science-based FTL rules. The rules finally adopted, in late 2013, gave a push to harmonization across Europe and replaced many outdated regulations in several EU countries. However, it also substituted existing state-of-the-art FTL schemes – such as in Scandinavian countries’ or the UK’s ‘CAP-371’ – by a lower level of safety standard, resulting in ‘safety-regression’ in some of Europe’s most important aviation nations. At that time, not only pilot associations but – more importantly – renowned scientists strongly warned about the numerous safety shortcomings when the regulation was initially approved (see ETSC report, 2013). EASA FTL was regarded to be too complex and based insufficiently on the extensive scientific studies and medical knowledge accumulated over more than 30 years.
The new EASA FTL concept intends to combine two fundamentally different approaches to provide sufficient protection from fatigue: the traditional approach of a tightly regulated prescriptive rule set and a flexible customisable system under a Fatigue Risk Management (FRM or FRM(S)). The latter, once approved by the national aviation authority (NAA), validated by EASA, and fine-tuned at operator level, would allow to accommodate the operators’ individual operational needs, but still provide the same – or even a higher – level of safety. As such, FRM(S) would come on top of the prescriptive rules, providing an additional and proactive safety layer, and providing more operational flexibility.
On the 1st anniversary of EASA’s new rules, ECA however notes several major shortcomings primarily in regards to the implementation and handling of EASA FTL:
- Despite new FTL rules, pilot fatigue continues to be a reality in Europe’s cockpits, especially in those areas that scientific experts had identified as the weak spots, such as night flights,
- Inconsistent & diverging interpretations and applications of the new rules,
- Widespread flaws in the operators’ FRM, and
- ‘Deviations’ from the new rules, some of which are questionable from a safety perspective.
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