Are Your FRM Processes Actually in Control - or Just Busy?

Here's an uncomfortable question: when you tweak a roster to reduce fatigue risk, how do you know you've actually improved anything — and not just reacted to noise?

A Jeppesen white paper borrows a lesson from 1930s manufacturing to answer that. The short version: the industry abandoned end-of-line inspection decades ago because it was expensive, slow, and missed the point entirely. Sound familiar?

If you're using a fatigue model mainly as a pass/fail gate at the end of scheduling, you might be running the same playbook.

The paper makes a compelling case for applying Statistical Process Control to FRM - treating crew planning as the production process it actually is, tracking meaningful metrics over time, and telling the difference between a real trend and random variation. It introduces Normalised Fatigue Risk (NFR) as a metric built for exactly this purpose.

It's a short read. The question it leaves you with is not. Read the paper here.