Flight Attendant Fatigue: A Quantitative Review of Flight Attendant Comments

Today’s aviation industry is a 24/7 operation that produces a variety of challenges for cabin crew members including extended duty periods, highly variable schedules, frequent time zone changes, and increased passenger loads. The present content analysis study was conducted to provide a quantitative review of flight attendant comments provided on the congressionally mandated survey of flight attendant field operations that was conducted in 2008. This report can be used as a supplement to interpret the published survey results (Avers et al., 2009b). Two hundred surveys were randomly selected for each type of operation and level of seniority. A total of 1,800 surveys with comments were content analyzed (936 paper, 864 online). Eight broad comment categories were identified, including: scheduling, health, airline and airline policy, job performance and satisfaction, meals, survey, workload, and break facilities.