A RARE tragedy came to pass on December 7th: a fatal crash at a European airport. As it came into land at a foggy Basel airport in France, a light aircraft narrowly missed a British Airways jet on the runway. The smaller plane burst into flames; two people were reportedly killed. Such occurrences are thankfully few and far between. Flying is about as safe a form of transport as there is. A commercial flight takes off somewhere in the world, on average, every second. That is some 37m journeys a year. Yet according to IATA, the main airline-industry body, last year not a single passenger on a commercial jet died in an accident. (IATA does not count deliberate acts of sabotage as accidents, such as Germanwings flight 9525, which was deliberately downed by its pilot over the French Alps. ) Flying in Europe is especially safe. In 2015, there were just 1.5 accidents for every million flights.

The reason for such a remarkable safety record is a lack of complacency among airlines and regulators. Pilots routinely report their mistakes to their bosses; problems are, in general, taken seriously. That makes a new paper released by the London School of Economics particularly interesting reading.

Researchers at the LSE interviewed over 7,000 European captains and first officers, which is around 14% of the total number of pilots employed in the region. As one might expect, the vast majority said that they felt that safety was taken seriously, and that they were encouraged to voice safety concerns to managers. However there was one area which seemed to be a particular cause for worry. Close to 60% of pilots said that their colleagues were often tired at work. And half said that their employers did not take the issue of pilot fatigue seriously. That backs up other studies, some of which have shown that up to half of pilots say they have fallen asleep while in the air.

The LSE paper finds the problem to be particularly acute on cargo operators and, worryingly for passengers, low-cost carriers. Earlier this year flight crew from easyJet, the continent’s second-biggest budget airline, called for industrial action over concerns about tired pilots. (A resolution has since been reached, although no details of the deal were released.) The European Cockpit Association, a pilots’ pressure group, says that tiredeness is regularly underreported. The problem is compounded, it says, because routine medical checks often do not pick up fatigue and “fatigue affects cognition and leads to an impairment of performance, which is difficult to self-assess”.

As of this year, all European carriers must adhere to rules limiting pilots’ flight time. This includes a maximum of 13 hours a day in the cockpit, spread over no more than two flights, and a minimum of one 36-hour period of rest from flying once a week. Pilots, it seems, find that insufficient. Safety is the air-travel industry’s biggest selling point. No reputable carrier takes risks with it. To ensure that continues, airlines should be tireless about combating tiredness.