Who may participate?
Any commercial airline pilot or cabin crew member is welcome to participate. You will need to use your own iOS device (iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad) for the collection as this is the only supported platform for CrewAlert.

When will FDC 2012 run?
We aim for a collection of data during two weeks in April 2012.

How does the data collection work?
You will be provided with e-learning material and use CrewAlert as for the data collection.

What data will be collected?
Basic settings, your schedule, your actual sleep, and of course the alertness assessments. The assessments are made on three scales: KSS – the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale, the Samn Perelli scale, and also a Psychomotor Vigilance Test – a reaction test.

How is my data uploaded and protected?
Data is transferred securely over an encrypted connection straight from CrewAlert over a wifi connection to a Jeppesen server. The data is de-identified and stored and processed respecting relevant data integrity legislation.

What’s in it for me?
First of all a contribution to science making sure that actual operational data, instead of mostly laboratory data, also is correlated and contribute to model development. Secondly we will make sure that participants are provided with a report over the results before everyone else. Thirdly you will be provided with a free copy of CrewAlert and also a chance of winning an iPad. We will run a lottery among the 50% of participants that uploaded the most valuable data. (“Valuable” will be a weighted sum of number of days covered, number of assessments and the coverage of sleep journals registering actual sleep.)

How do you know that there won’t be malicious data uploaded by crew, or even others, with their own agenda?
We don’t. We do however have filtering techniques available on incoming data that together with an assumption that the majority have sound intentions we should be able to reach fair data quality. We also have prior experiences of data collection with CrewAlert to compare with.

As an airline operator, how can we take part of the collected data in FDC2012?
You would need to communicate to your FDC2012 participating crew that they should append an airline-unique suffix to the so-called survey code used in CrewAlert. At the end of FDC2012, Jeppesen will use the suffix to extract the data originating from your operation. The suffix is provided by Jeppesen – please contact us on frm@jeppesen.com to make arrangements in due time before the collection starts.

In what form will data will be delivered back to us operators?
The data is extracted and delivered back in a concise format called ADSF - the Alertness Data Standard Format. The data contains the roster activities themselves, journals over sleep/wake, assessments on the KSS and Samn-Perelli scales, the NPI measurements, and the individual settings with diurnal type, habitual sleep length etc. Basically all registered information in CrewAlert is shared. Note that the data does not contain any information regarding employee number, name or contact details – crew remain anonymous. Crew will select themselves which time period to share data from and may also choose not to reveal certain data.

What if I, as a crew member, is willing to share my data with Jeppesen and the scientists for advancing science, but not with the airline I work for?
First of all; the collected data is fully anonymized. Since you choose your name and password yourself, Jeppesen and your airline (if using an airline-provided suffix to the survey code) will not receive more data than you choose to enter. Fields like gender, weight, height etc can be left out if that makes you more comfortable sharing. Even the airport names on your roster can be left out. This will result in some extra effort to manually enter time-zone changes. Finally, if you for some reason still are reluctant to share with your airline, you have the option of leaving out the additional suffix which disables any data feedback to your airline. Jeppesen has then no means of knowing which airline the data comes from.

Where do I find the survey code, and survey code suffix to enter into CrewAlert?
All crew registering for FDC2012 are provided with e-learning material including a few video clips informing on how to use CrewAlert. The general survey code for FDC2012 is provided in one of those videos – this in order to provide the scientists with some confidence that participants have received training on the tool. The airline-specific survey code suffix is provided to you by your airline – most likely part of normal internal communication.

How do I use the airline-specific suffix?
Simply append it to the general survey code in your account settings in CrewAlert. If the general FDC2012 code is (example): “FDCabcd”, and the airline suffix is (example): “EFGH”, the full survey code to enter in CrewAlert will become “FDCabcdEFGH”. So using just “FDCabcd” would mean only sharing your data with Jeppesen and the scientists, using “FDCabcdEFGH” means sharing BOTH with Jeppesen and the scientists AND your airline safety team.