Fully Charged is a joint campaign among the FAA, NATCA and PASS established in 2014 to socialize the issue of fatigue in air traffic facilities throughout the nation, and to start a change in the culture of how the workforce thinks about and views fatigue, and values alertness.
This year, Fully Charged is expanding its educational and informational efforts to include eight areas of health and wellness. Each of these eight areas have the potential to impact an individual’s ability to be Fully Charged and perform his or her best on the job. They include:
1. Career: Mentoring, career planning, outside employment
2. Emotional: Stress and anger strategies, depression, additions, EAP assistance
3. Environmental: Home sleep quarters, commuting time or distance
4. Financial: Life event strategies, financial planning, retirement planning
5. Intellectual: lifelong learning strategies, personal skill assessment and curiosity
6. Nutrition: Healthy nutrition guidance, foods to support alertness and health sleep
7. Physical: Fitness and exercise, medical certifications, sleep disorders
8. Social: family and friend dynamics, generational differences, work/life balance.
PASS representative on the Fully Charged Workgroup, Kelly McGonigal, hopes to see policies and procedures that not only account for controller fatigue mitigation, but all those involved in the safety of the National Airspace System (NAS).
“We need to continue awareness and education of practices and policies to mitigate fatigue,” said McGonigal. We have come a long way as an agency but we still have more to do. It’s an aspect of safety and with safety we can never get complacent or let safety take a break. Fully Charged is a valuable tool for keeping fatigue awareness on all or our minds.”
NATCA Human Performance Liaison Jay Barrett says the Fully Charged campaign has been successful in raising awareness of personal fatigue issues that were largely unrealized by safety professionals. He believes integrating health and wellness information into the campaign is a logical fit that will assist controllers and technicians in separating the noise from the science concerning human performance.
“I am optimistic we can fill an information vacuum and provide science based information and resources that will assist our professionals in making informed decisions that will keep them in top form physically, emotionally and economically,” he explains. “I look forward to working with the Fully Charged workgroup as we increase our voltage to help keep everyone fully charged.”
Health and wellness areas connect employees with information, tools and resources that improve your understanding in these eight areas to increase and sustain optimal health and peak performance.
The Air Traffic Organization (ATO) is dedicating one month for each of the eight aspect areas to share how these areas can affect you, ways you can mitigate the effects and the ways the ATO can support you in your daily life outside of work, so that you can perform at your best at work.
