ASAP – Fatigue

Hello Fellow Flight Attendants,

Wishing everyone well! I am writing in regard to our current contract and reminding you all that we do have a Fatigue Policy implemented for our protection along with the ASAP program.

You will find the verbiage under Article 26, Health, Safety, and security.  It is on page 166-167 in our electronic format.  It is a wonderful protection for you if at any time, your schedule has been altered by the company due to weather and maintenance or if you experienced a loud or abnormal hotel experience that diminished your rest opportunity.

Please remember for hotel issues, you will need advocate for yourself first.  Call the front desk and try to remedy the situation.  If the situation does not get resolved, call crew scheduling and tell them the person with whom you spoke with and let them know that your rest has been compromised. This is for informational and documentation purposes only as crew scheduling will not change anything for you regarding your schedule.

If you experience long maintenance or weather delays and you are feeling unfit to fly, you must advocate for yourself.  When speaking with a rep from crew scheduling, be very specific with your words that you are calling out ‘”Fatigued”, you are not calling out sick.

After filing a Fatigue Report via the “Report It” app, you will need to answer a series of seven questions.

Be specific with your answers. Short but detailed. 

Example:

  1.  Were you fit to fly?  No
  2. Why were you not fit to fly?  Extreme weather delays and multiple plane swaps
  3. Please explain what the trip was like.  Extreme weather delays and multiple plane swaps.
  4. What was happening in the days before you called out?  Multiple weather delays.
  5. What kind of day were you having when you called off?  Extreme continuous delays
  6. Did you bid for this line?  No, I did not bid for 14-hour days.
  7. Did anything happen at the hotel?  Yes, Fire alarm went off interrupting rest

(This is just an example.)

*** Remember to file your report within 72 hours.

If you discover that you were fatigued after you were in the air, you would file an ASAP report. ASAPs are viewed by FAA and because this was a safety issue (due to not being fit to fly) you would want to document it with the FAA. Having the FAA involved and aware of what is happening to our trips and how it affects us physically gives us an extra hand of support in getting procedures and our trips changed.  However, you never want to knowingly fly fatigued. It is very common to not know how fatigued you may be until you are up and flying. In your report, state “I flew fatigued however, I did not realize I was fatigued until I was in the air”.

Management goes by data.  Management loves numbers and graphs, so please file those reports and give them the data that should produce a positive change for us. Unless they see that these excessive plane swaps are creating a hardship for us physically, things will not change. We need to do this for ourselves and each other.

If you have any questions, please contact me directly.

In Unity,

Jennifer Levcun
LEC 16 Fatigue Representative
jenniferlevcun@afahorizon.org
(360) 731-6794