The Impact of Mental Fatigue on Aircraft Maintenance Tasks Among Aircraft Maintenance Students

Fatigue Factors, Management, and Flight Training Safety Among Cadet Pilots at the Indonesian Aviation Academy Banyuwangi

Fatigue is a critical human-factors hazard in flight training because it can impair attention, procedural memory, communication, and aircraft control. This study examined the dominant causes of fatigue among cadet pilots at the Indonesian Aviation Academy Banyuwangi, the strategies used to manage it, and the institutional implications for flight training safety. A descriptive qualitative case-study design was supported by an exploratory questionnaire, direct observation of training schedules, semi-structured interviews, and a literature review. Thirty-one cadets in the CPL-IR phase with more than 50 flight hours completed a seven-item questionnaire, and four cadets representing the participating cohorts completed interviews guided by 15 questions. Questionnaire data were summarized using frequencies, while interview and observation data were analyzed through data condensation, thematic display, and conclusion verification. Twenty-nine of 31 cadets reported experiencing fatigue. The most frequently reported contributors were insufficient sleep (13 responses), high physical workload (10), and insufficient nutrition (8). Concentration and procedural disruption were the most common consequences (18 responses). Interviews further showed that compressed schedules, consecutive flight, simulator, academic, hangar, and dormitory duties created cumulative fatigue, while institutional responses to fatigue reporting were inconsistent. The study is novel in framing cadet fatigue as an interaction between individual recovery practices and institutional scheduling conditions. It recommends an academy-level Fatigue Risk Management System incorporating non-punitive reporting, schedule-risk assessment, pre-flight fitness checks, protected rest, and nutrition and hydration support.

COMPARATIVE EVALUATION OF

Cognitive Framework for Aircraft Piloting: A Core Cognition Set

Human factors remain the predominant contributors to aviation accidents, yet the cognitive foundations of pilot performance have not been systematically defined. Existing cognitive frameworks inadequately represent the complex, high-demand environment of flight operations. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to identify a core cognition set for piloting, defined as the minimal group of cognitive modules most consistently related to flight performance, and to examine how these modules are affected by aviation-specific risk factors. A total of 93 studies were included in this review. Of these, 31 reported quantitative associations between cognitive performance and flight outcomes. A three-level mixed-effects meta-regression model was applied to estimate pooled effect sizes for each cognitive module. Meanwhile, 74 studies examined the influence of aviation factors such as fatigue, hypoxia, gravitational load, and aging. Meta-analytic findings indicated four cognitive modules (Perception, Working Memory, Multitasking Flexibility, and Psychomotor) as showing the strongest and most reliable associations with flight performance (Fisher’s z = 0.356–0.440, p < 0.001). The narrative synthesis corroborated that these four modules were most sensitive to operational and physiological risks such as fatigue, sleep deprivation, hypoxia, and aging. Working memory and cognitive flexibility consistently emerged as the earliest indicators of cognitive deterioration.

Human Factors in Aviation Maintenance: Task Design and Safety Implications

Aviation maintenance remains a safety‑critical domain where human‑factor errors persist despite technological progress and regulation. Traditional human‑factors approaches are largely retrospective, offering limited predictive insight when task design, cognitive workload, fatigue, and procedural ambiguity exceed human capacity. This study develops and validates a Human Performance Integration (HPI) Model, a predictive, engineering-oriented framework linking maintenance task design with cognitive constraints and error probability. A mixed‑methods design combines technician interviews (n = 21) and 47 incident reports from a regional airline. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification models non‑linear interactions among workload, fatigue, task complexity, and documentation clarity. The HPI model functions as a proactive design support tool, enabling engineers to evaluate task structures and workload allocations, embedding human performance limits directly into safety critical design decisions.

Effects of cognitive load and time-on-task on mental fatigue in real-world drilling operations.

Mental fatigue is an important human factors issue affecting safety performance in high-risk operations. Previous studies have relied on short laboratory tasks and often examined the effects of time-on-task and cognitive load separately. This study investigated their joint effects on mental fatigue in a real drilling environment using EEG cross-frequency coupling (CFC) and a Transformer model. Cognitive load and time-on-task jointly influenced mental fatigue, as reflected in changes in local efficiency and global network reconfiguration. The Transformer framework achieved accuracies of 90.2% and 89.3%, while SHAP analysis identified efficiency entropy as the most important feature. Overall, CFC features effectively characterised mental fatigue in real operations and may support fatigue monitoring, human factors risk identification, and safety management in high-risk settings.

Physiological and Subjective Assessment of Fighter Pilot Mental Workload.