By Shannon Steffke, Staff Writer
Gas station coffee that’s been on the burner since three. The top of a Mountain Dew bottle twisted off in the truck on the way in. A Monster in the door of every third pickup on the property.
Somebody brewed a pot at home at 3:45 and filled a thermos that will still be going at ten. There’s the guy who drinks it black and mentions it. There’s the person on their third refill of something with four kinds of syrup in it who’d tell you they’re “not really a coffee person.” At 4:30 in the morning on any AOA in the country, you can read the whole crew by what they’re holding.
Nobody is tracking any of this and nobody thinks they need to.
However, while those drinks have the same mission, they are not the same at all. A standard cup of coffee has about 95 milligrams of caffeine. An energy drink can have two or three times that. The travel mug someone fills at home holds two or three cups, not one. By the end of a shift, the lightest and heaviest caffeine drinkers on a crew might be several hundred milligrams apart. And probably not one of them could tell you where they land.
Before the First Departure
Start times on the AOA are early on purpose. Inspections, sweeping, lighting checks, and pavement work all have to happen before the first departure. That puts a lot of crews on the field between four and six in the morning.
A 5 a.m. report means leaving the house by 4:30. That means an alarm at four, which also means getting to sleep by nine the night before to hit a full eight hours. Almost nobody can accomplish that because life complicates things, and the body doesn’t always cooperate either.
Here’s what makes it worse: research shows that sleep before an early shift is not just shorter, it’s lower quality. People sleep lighter and wake up more when they know an early alarm is coming. So the shift that looks safest on paper, a normal daylight shift starting at five, is running on some of the worst sleep of anybody’s week.
Winter is the extreme version. Snow crews work through the night, get called in at odd hours, and stay out as long as the weather demands. Everybody in the industry already knows that’s hard. What gets missed is the ordinary Tuesday in July, where a 4:30 a.m. report time looks routine but quietly isn’t.
What the Cup Can Do
The good news about caffeine is real. A review of fatigue research published in October 2025 looked at how military pilots fight tiredness. It found caffeine was one of the most effective short-term tools available. It improves alertness and reaction time during long stretches awake. It works, it works fast, and it’s already in everyone’s hand.
If you are dragging at five in the morning and you reach for a cup, the research is on your side.
What the Cup Can’t Do
But that same review found something the coffee cup doesn’t advertise. How well caffeine works depends on the person. It depends on how well they slept and how their body handles being tired. And when people were sleep-deprived, past about 27 hours awake, no amount of caffeine brought them back to normal. It narrowed the gap but it didn’t close it.
Researchers in the Netherlands tested thirty-five pilots, giving some of them real coffee and some decaf without telling them which. Then they measured two kinds of tasks. Simple attention tests, and a harder setup that mimicked real operational work with several things happening at once.
On the simple tests, coffee helped. On the harder multitasking setup, the improvement didn’t show up.
What did show up was the feeling. Everybody got sleepier as the day went on, but the people drinking real coffee felt less sleepy. Their heart rate and blink rate backed that up. So the coffee reliably changed how alert those pilots felt. It did not reliably change how well they handled a complicated environment.
An active AOA is a complicated environment.
The gap between feeling sharp and being sharp is where things go wrong on the ground.
Think about how a tired person behaves when they know they’re tired. They slow down. They double-check. They call for a confirmation before crossing. They give themselves a margin, because they know they need one.
Now think about a tired person who feels fine. They do none of that, because as far as they can tell, there’s nothing to correct for. That’s the vehicle that proceeds on a clearance it only half heard or the driver who reads the wrong hold-short line on a movement area they’ve crossed a thousand times.
The second person is more dangerous than the first, and caffeine is very good at turning the first person into the second.
The numbers on airfield ground work back this up. The clearest data comes from the ramp, where industry safety reporting from 2016 through 2020 found that ramp accidents made up about ten percent of all aviation accidents. Studies of construction crews tell a similar story. That’s a different job, but the conditions rhyme: heavy equipment, moving vehicles, tight timelines, early starts. Those studies found that workers who weren’t sleeping enough had roughly a nine to ten percent higher risk of an accident, and the risk was highest for the people out in the field rather than in an office.
Timing matters as much as total sleep. Injury risk is higher on afternoon shifts than morning shifts, and higher still at night. On night shifts, the risk tends to spike early rather than at the end, before the body has adjusted to being awake.
Everybody’s Fatigue Plan is Caffeine
Here’s the thing about fatigue rules in aviation. For flight crews, they’re strict, written down, and enforced. Pilots have duty limits. There are rules about how long they can work and how much rest they get between shifts.
For the people working below them, most of that doesn’t exist.
Sleep researchers at Harvard have called fatigue in ground handling a neglected topic in aviation safety. What’s true on the ramp is true across the AOA. The crews inspecting, maintaining, plowing, and driving that airfield work the same brutal hours under the same conditions, with even less written down about any of it.
Which means the fatigue management system on most airfields is coffee.
Not a policy. Not a schedule built around when people can actually sleep. Not a rule about how long someone can stay out in a snow event. Just coffee, bought individually, dosed by accident, and trusted completely.
The FAA has started asking questions. It sent out a Ramp Worker Safety Questionnaire this spring to ground operations, line service, fueling, and airport operations staff, and it closed in early July. Somebody is finally collecting data on the people who work below the wing. The airfield side is still waiting for its turn.
None of this is an argument against the morning cup. Caffeine is a legitimate tool, and the research supports using it. But a tool works better when you know what it does and what it doesn’t. It buys a few hours of alertness. It doesn’t buy back a night of sleep. And it’s much better at changing how a shift feels than it is at changing how a shift goes.
The hours aren’t going to get more forgiving. The first flight still has to leave on time, the field still has to be ready before dawn, and somebody still has to be out there at 4:30 to make it happen. That’s the job, and it isn’t changing.
What can change is how closely we watch the things that don’t show up on a schedule. Alder was built on the idea that the human side of the airfield (how tired people are, whether they feel heard, whether anyone’s actually paying attention to them) is a critical safety factor, not a soft one. Our escorts and flaggers spend their days watching for exactly the kind of small, easy-to-miss moment that a tired crew is most likely to have. The gap between feeling sharp and being sharp is where those moments happen, and it’s the whole reason we’re out there.
The cup in your hand at 4:30 this morning is doing something. It’s worth knowing what.
About the Author
Shannon Steffke is an experienced journalist, professional marketer, and communicator with a focus on writing that’s clear, credible, and grounded in research. She’s contributed to Alder since 2024, helping the company communicate its expertise to the people who need it most.
Further Reading
https://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/acrp/fy2017ps/17-04-05Barger.pdf
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/eng-2022-0411/html?lang=en
https://www.arcom.ac.uk/-docs/proceedings/ar2010-0203-0211_Powell_and_Copping.pdf
https://www.iwh.on.ca/plain-language-summaries/shift-work-and-health
https://nata.aero/faa-seeks-industry-input-on-ramp-worker-safety/