Operationally Ready and Fit for Duty

As organisations we always say that people are our most important asset and we know that effective human performance is at the heart of safe operations. But what does that really mean at a practical level for how we manage risks in our organisations? At the same time EASA has many different activities and initiatives surrounding the human in the aviation system, such as the recently completed MESAFE project on mental health. This article discusses will help you understand where people fit into the bigger picture of safety and how all the different rules and other activities fit together to help people perform to their best.  It will also help to understand where initiatives such as MESAFE fit into the bigger picture.

Understanding the Safety Map

The best place to start is the “EASA Safety Map”. This covers the 6 building blocks of safety. The 3 parts on the left side, Mindset, People and Resources are the more strategic things that underpin your operational activities. You need things in place before the operation starts. If operations were like a football match, these are the things you do before the whistle blows to start the game.

Then once operations start (and the whistle blows), the 3 parts on the right side then support the safety of the active operation. You comply with rules and procedures – of course ensuring before things start that any organisational or local processes or procedures are fit for purpose. Then as you start whatever task you are doing, you continually manage risks through Threat and Error Management (TEM). Finally, you apply your learning to stay safe and help learning on the go.

The final learning part also applies at a strategic level. At both organisational and system level we talk about safety and have a positive approach to learning and continuous improvement at a system level.

Defining the “People” part of the Safety Map

For the “People” element – we define this as “Having enough competent people who are operationally ready and fit for duty”. This is a 3-part problem:

• “Enough”. Ensuring that we have the right number of people to support our operation. At a strategic level, EASA is working on this through EPAS Safety Promotion Task (SPT) 0097 – future workforce challenges. This covers topics such as organisational culture so that we have organisations that people actually want to work for, DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) to broaden the talent pool and finally reaching out and inspiring the next generation.
• “Competent”. It is also important that our people have the skills, knowledge and abilities to perform their role. We put a lot of effort into training our staff and enabling them to learn how to deal with the different operational situations they will face.
• “Operationally ready and fit for duty”. The final part of the people box is much harder to define and understand. This is what we are going to discuss in the rest of this article.

The concept of “Operationally ready and fit for duty”

This final part of the people box covers quite a broad area. On the face of it, if you took a purely aviation-focus, compliance-based approach to this part you might only consider how you applied the follow rules in your organisation:

• Fatigue and flight time limitations.
• Medical assessment of specific personnel who need a medical check as part of their licence.
• Peer support programme.
• Psychoactive substances.

Interesting though that is – consider likely just following these rules would help your staff to be “operationally ready and fit for duty” at all times so that they are able to perform to the best of their abilities, safely and for the duration of the time they will be at work. This last point is particularly important, your staff have to able to fly, maintain, control etc for their whole duty period. Thinking it is enough for them just to be fit for duty at the beginning doesn’t really ensure safety.

The importance of taking a more risk-based approach to “operationally ready and fit for duty”

Instead of taking a purely, aviation-focused compliance based approach, the safety of your operation requires you to take a risk-based approach to this instead. Ironically, both the EASA rules on Management System in ORO.GEN.200 of the Air Ops Rules and your national Health and Safety Regulations already require you to do this anyway. They just make it easier not to, because neither really define what it looks like or how you would do it – unless you look very hard for it.

So what are we talking about? At a basic level a risk-based approach to “operationally ready and fit for duty” should lead you to asking pro-actively how to ensure that your staff are suitably mentally and physically able to perform to the best of their abilities for the duration of their duty.

Understanding the different types of staff in the aviation system

Before we get into slightly more detail on this part, it is useful to quickly define the different types of staff we have in the aviation system. Partly because the type of staff determines some of the levers that exist in the system to help manage particularly the mental health aspects. But also to ensure that you understand the importance of tailoring your physical and mental health activities to the different groups of staff you have in your organisation. They all do different things, in different places (some inside in the warm and some outside in the heat/ cold for example).

• Licenced staff with medical requirements: Specifically, pilots and air traffic controllers.
• Licenced staff without medical requirements: Maintenance personnel for example.
• Non-Licenced staff with medical requirements: Such as cabin crew who require a medical assessment as part of their attestation.
• Non-Licenced staff without medical requirements: Many other staff who may or may require formal training but have no official licence or ongoing medical fitness requirements.

The “operationally ready and fit for duty” funnel

Hopefully now you understand that a risk based approach to “operationally ready and fit for duty” requires you to have a proper physical and psychological health and safety programme. You move beyond compliance to a primary, secondary and tertiary model that exist like a funnel.

• Primary Level – Risk Identification and Mitigation: You start at the primary level by pro-actively identifying hazards and risks so that you can mitigate them proactively within your operation. At a physical level, this could be proactive fatigue risk management similar to the examples provided at the recent EASA Fatigue Conference that you can read more about here. It could be as simple as providing the right clothing and equipment to ramp staff. For psychological health and safety, the approach is the same – identify and mitigate specific risks in your organisation and its operation – a great place to start is ISO-45003, guidelines for managing psychological health and safety at work.
• Secondary Level – Early detection and intervention: The secondary level provides the ability to detect situations early and intervene before things get worse and lead to a more serious medical or mental health issue. Peer support is an example of such an intervention and hence is also why it isn’t the sole mental health solution that many people think it does. It’s also why peer support also needs to made available to as many different staff groups as possible, not just pilots and air traffic controllers because they are licenced staff with medical requirements.  
• Tertiary Level – Recovery and reduction of the risk of future problems: At the tertiary level there is specialist intervention from medical experts and mental health professionals. One weakness of this part in aviation, is that like peer support it is mostly only available to pilots and controllers. As an organisation, you should also have ways to help all types of staff who need help. This is where the EASA MESAFE project comes in by providing information and best practice to help aeromedical professionals provide the best possible support to pilots and controllers that they are there to support.

Summary

Hopefully this article has helped you to understand more about the importance of tasking a risk-based approach to helping staff to perform to the best of their abilities. We miss so much when we look from purely a compliance approach and we leave so many risks unmanaged.

Consider the whole funnel of “operationally ready and fit for duty”, identify the mental and psychological hazards that your staff face is their daily work and then put in effective mitigations as early as possible.