Military officers becoming more alert to fatigue

NORFOLK

During the first Gulf War, Navy pilot Ken Neubauer was flying a tough but standard rotation: two days of day missions, one day off, two days of night missions, repeat.

One night, he launched his F-14 Tomcat off the carrier America just before midnight for a flight over Iraq. He didn't return until dawn.

"To this day, I have vague recollections of how I actually got the airplane back on the ship," he said. But he didn't complain.

"Fatigue was something that you gutted through," he said. "Working tired, for some, was worn as a badge of honor. You were saying, 'I can hack it. I'm the guy you can count on, regardless.' "

It wasn't until decades later, when he was overseeing aviation safety in Monterey, Calif., that Neubauer realized how dangerous this thinking had been.

A growing body of evidence has drawn sleep deprivation and fatigue into the spotlight in recent years. And as accident tracking and physiological monitoring become more sophisticated, the Navy is trying its best to address what can be an insidious issue.

For Neubauer, the "Aha!" moment came when researcher Nita Miller gave a talk at the Naval Postgraduate School on sleep cycles on ships.

"We were just monkeying around with people's circadian rhythms and had no idea what we were doing," Neubauer said.

The brain is a chemical-based computer that needs periodic recharging. The only way to do that is by getting enough rest to allow the body to cycle through certain levels of sleep.

This is much easier said than done, said Capt. Nick Davenport, who worked under Neubauer both at the Naval School of Aviation Safety and later at Norfolk's Naval Safety Center. Davenport is now the center's flight surgeon and head of its aeromedical division.

"As a society, we've always felt that sleep was optional," he said. In the days before widespread television and Internet, people went to sleep when it got dark. But over the past 50 years, society has lost an average of an hour or more of sleep a night.

This sleep debt accumulates. For the military, where the work is often fast and dangerous, the results can be harmful, if not deadly.

Safety center data collected over the past two decades show that fatigue is the largest single cause of all classes of naval aviation mishaps and hazard reports.

In the past, Davenport said, accidents that might have been attributed to boredom, inattention or a loss of bearings are emerging as fatigue issues.

An easily understood way of expressing fatigue's effect on psychomotor performance is to equate it with alcohol consumption.

Davenport often cites data from a 1997 article in the magazine Nature, which show that once someone has been awake for about 23 hours straight, that person's performance is comparable to that of someone with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08, which makes a person legally drunk in any U.S. state.

Other research has explored the circadian rhythms of the body, cellular restoration during sleep cycles and so on. All have shown that fatigue can have a harmful effect.

Davenport said people in the military are enthusiastic about this research, until he starts asking them to change their operations.

"Then people push back and say, 'Where's the good solid science?' " he said. "If an aviation commander comes to me and says, 'I'll fly this pilot at this many hours. What is the increased chance of mishap?' I can't tell him that."

As researchers increase their data and refine models, they are reaching out to front-line people to help. This includes a squadron in Iraq that has been experimenting with how best to rotate its pilots' flight schedules, Davenport said.

Neubauer said this sort of testing could be taken further, because pilots are often the best rested people on the ship. The air crews who fuel, maintain, launch and recover the planes during carrier operations often get by on just naps.

"I think it's optimistic that we're going to have everyone on board operating at 100 percent cognitive ability because they got enough sleep," he said. "It's not in the American culture to do that. We're 24/7 kind of people."

But for those who are trying to combat fatigue, technology is coming to the rescue.

The Naval Safety Center has been experimenting with the Fatigue Avoidance Scheduling Tool, or FAST. This software mathematically predicts performance over time, given specific sleep and work schedules.

Since 2006, investigators have used FAST when examining mishaps, to see how fatigue might have played a role, Davenport said.

On the private side, Neubauer, who retired from the Navy in 2007, now works in aerospace safety at Futron in Hampton. His company is working with a Japanese researcher who is developing a computer-based system that can detect a person's fatigue level based on voice.

Neubauer said the data and science are the easy part. The real challenge is changing the way the Navy does business.

What the aviation safety school has tried to do, under his and subsequent leadership, is make sure mid-career officers get on board with the program, he said. As they progress up the leadership chain, the hope is that this thinking about fatigue will stay with them.

"This is not something that's being blown off. It's being gone after with (a) fair amount of rigor," Neubauer said of the Navy. But, he added, "you've got a military organization that is very effective, with highly dedicated, motivated people, and we've been doing it this way for many years.

"In order to turn this large vessel, it takes a lot of rudder, and that makes the course change just a little bit."

Matthew Jones, (757) 446-2949, matthew.jones@pilotonline.com