Our unseen and too often unrecognized passenger is, of course, stress. When we least expect it, stress can rear its ugly head and bite us, cause us to make bad decisions or impulsively make other cockpit mistakes.
But with proper awareness, care, and concern, that not need happen to you. After all, you're the pilot in command. Check your "passenger manifest" very carefully every time before you fly and, if this ghostly stowaway has somehow crept aboard unnoticed, unload him ASAP. Stress is a passenger that none of us need to have flying with us. Leave him on the ground.
Concern Over Decision Making
The key concern about unchecked stress in aviation, of course, is that it can fatally affect pilot judgment and decision making. It makes no difference whether it's so-called "good" stress or "bad" stress. Both can be dangerous.
In 1997, the FAA published its latest revision of Federal Aviation Regulation Part 61, "Certification of Pilots, Flight Instructors and Ground Instructors." Stress is considered so serious that the regulation now requires flight instructors to specifically teach aeronautical decision making, a key ingredient of which can be stress. Examiners have to evaluate it too.
Faulty pilot judgment, according to the FAA, accounted for 51.6 percent of the fatal accidents over a five-year period.
Since that time, at least four new FAA handbooks (superseding older advisory circulars) have also been published, and they all include sections on decision making. They are the Airplane Flying Handbook, the Aviation Instructor's Handbook, the Instrument Flying Handbook, and the Rotorcraft Flying Handbook. Aside from new and revised flying material, significant attention is paid to the mechanics of pilot decision making.
The impact of unchecked stress on pilot decision making is serious - and it merits reflective consideration before and during every flight.
Most of us wouldn't think about flying any airplane without preflighting it first. Professional pilots apply the same care to preflighting themselves. Before every flight, run the I'M SAFE checklist contained in the Aeronautical Information Manual.
- I - Illness: Check yourself for illness; if you don't feel well, don't fly.
- M - Medication: Ensure that you aren't taking any unauthorized medications, and that any over-the-counter medicines you think are OK aren't affecting you adversely.
- S - Stress: Are you stressed out, bringing your daily concerns into the airplane with you? Do you have job, money, family, or health-related problems that could affect your cockpit judgment? Can you leave your problems on the ground? If not, don't fly.
- A - Alcohol: No alcoholic beverages within the past eight hours, or flying at any time while under the influence.
- F - Fatigue: Are you too tired to fly or respond properly to an emergency? Don't fly.
- E - Eating: Low blood sugar from inadequate nourishment can impair judgment; eat properly and don't skip meals before flying. Drink water, since dehydration can also adversely affect your judgment.
The Real Problem With Stress
If you were up late the night before, got caught in a traffic jam on the way to the airport, and then arrive to find that the airplane you were scheduled to fly has been broken since yesterday, but nobody called to tell you - call it quits for the day and go home. Don't wait for it to be fixed. Stress will almost certainly be your silent passenger, should you unwisely decide to fly. And that doesn't even consider other possible lifestyle stresses that could be caused by money, friends, family, health, and other concerns you might have on that particular day.
Do you know what your stressful personal issues are from day to day? Think about it. The message, of course, is to be aware of what they are and "leave 'em on the ground" when you fly. If you're becoming "overgrossed," download something or just don't fly that day.
We all live out of our personalities. Some of us are more stress-prone than others. That's not a sign of weakness, or a lack of "macho." It's a part of personality. Take inventory and do something about it.
Awareness Of Stress
So exactly what is stress, what should we know about it, and why is it so insidiously dangerous?
Simply put, stress is the body's normal defensive reaction to the demands made upon it by a variety of factors both internal and external, both pleasant and unpleasant. Stress affects us all.
What we can do about it, first of all, is to be aware of it. Then we need to understand it, be able to recognize its potential impact on our safety, and guard against the adverse affects that it can have on our preflight and in-flight decisions.
Experts have identified three specific types of stress that apply to most of us: physical, physiological, and psychological. While that sounds too clinical, it actually provides a practical breakdown to help us understand why and how stress works.
Physical stress. Do you now fly (or have you ever flown) in an environment where it is hot, cold, or humid for entire seasons of the year - where it's uncomfortable to even be on the ramp? Do everyday extremes of temperature or humidity just come with your territory? Do they impair your physical comfort, interfere with equipment, or cause other concerns? Do they affect your attitude?
How about when it's 120 degrees in the shade, your flight partner (or a beginning student) takes forever to preflight the airplane and needs supervision, even though the humidity is so high that you can literally feel it dripping off of you? Do you ever feel like all you want to do is just get the airplane off the ground? Now removed from those situations, can you assess how they affected you? Any stress?
How about when the heater is broken in the hangar and it's so cold that you're miserable just trying to preheat the engine? Does cold like that affect you - before you've even started the engine? Does it affect your judgment or your decisions?
How about when the incessant winds are blowing so hard that you have to strain to hear conversation and you know it's going to be another one of those days when the winds will be right at the limits of the airplane and/or your own skill? Does constant jet noise ever get on your nerves?
If you fly unpressurized aircraft at high density altitudes, lack of oxygen can be troubling, too - even when you're legal according to FAR 91. Dehydration accompanies lack of oxygen, and that, too, affects decision making whether you're in the cockpit or out of it. Is dehydration a consideration in mountain or high density-altitude flying? You bet.
All of these variables are physically stressful, and they are cumulative. Don't just blow them off as inconsequential.
Physiological stress. Have you ever lost sleep before a flight, but decided to fly anyway? Do you make habit of doing that, thinking that if you're going to fit it all in, that's just the price you pay?
OK, so maybe you've gotten away with that before. How about the next time? The trick is to understand that fatigue seriously affects judgment and motor skill - and act on your understanding.
Don't fly when you are tired, because fatigue causes stress. Fatigue is cumulative - as are all the other kinds of stress to which we're all exposed.
But you might say, "Hey, everybody else does it, don't they?" Well, everybody doesn't fly airplanes. Pilots do.
How about your overall physical condition? Ever felt that it wasn't all that good? Can you do something about it? Of course. No time like the present to start a program to get in flying shape. If you think you don't have the time to do that, consider the consequences. Whether you want to admit it or not, flying is both a physically and mentally demanding business.
Do you miss many meals? Did you know that insufficient nourishment can cause low blood sugar and inhibit cockpit decision making ability? Since flying is 98 percent head and only about 2 percent hands, low blood sugar and hunger are both bad news. They adversely affect your thinking ability - even in good flying conditions. Don't go without eating - especially on long flights - particularly if it is your habit to fly after a long day at work.
It goes without saying to stay on the ground if you're sick. No flight is so important that your other silent passenger has to be illness. When you're ill, cancel and come out another day when you can enjoy the flight.
Forewarned is forearmed that fatigue, hunger, altitude, and all of these other physiological stressors are dangerous if you're at the wrong place at the wrong time. If you don't feel up to speed, don't go. Can you recall any instance when you just hoped nothing would happen on the flight because, in retrospect, you knew you probably wouldn't have been able to handle it? Look back and ask yourself that question every now and then. Better yet, ask it before takeoff.
Psychological stress. Psychological stress has commanded a great deal of aviation research over the years. In nonaviation cases, we've all heard stories of individuals going off the deep end and opening fire on coworkers in crowded work environments.
The illness or death of a loved one, divorce or other relationship problems, money problems, and/or disappointment - or even poor performance - on the job are serious issues. In and of themselves, they can be devastating. Collectively, they can be disastrous. Our purpose is to focus on the fact that such situations can also seriously disturb and unconsciously degrade cockpit performance.
Add to these issues the increased mental workload caused by having to confront an in-flight problem while at the same time coping with worsening weather, and the picture can be one of enormous stress.
Compound this with the perceived need to quickly make a critical cockpit decision without adequate information, and pressure continues to build - especially when you realize you shouldn't have gotten into the situation to begin with - and a difficult situation becomes even worse. Judgment is affected, otherwise-clear decisions become muddled, and the danger increases proportionally.
It doesn't have to be that way. Awareness before the fact can raise warning flags and cause you to abort or divert a flight, thereby reducing stress, breaking the developing accident chain, and avoiding danger.
Awareness Is The Key
Awareness is indeed the key. It is essential to realize that stress, even that which falls in the category of "good stress," can affect decision-making and cockpit performance. Happy occasions - a promotion, marriage in the family - can cause stress, because they distract us from concentrating on flying. If the flight is routine, small distractions may not matter. But can we ever depend on having a routine flight?
While we should always be aware of stress as an enemy of good judgment, there are times when stressful situations occur unexpectedly. Develop an ability to "compartmentalize" - that is, discipline your mind to shut out pressures that do not address the immediate problem. Have you ever been so engrossed in a spellbinding novel that you don't even hear the phone ring? That's compartmentalization. Refuse to allow extraneous thoughts to interfere. Focus only on the task at hand. The problem will cause less stress, and its solution will be easier to find.
Over the last several years, numerous lists have been compiled by groups ranging from the AOPA Air Safety Foundation and the U.S. Navy to nationally prominent research firms and airline organizations. Varying scales and factors are listed and pilots are asked to evaluate themselves as to which factors apply to them and in what degree; each is scored, and when a certain number of points is accumulated - bingo! Ground yourself. You're so stressed that you're unsafe, and you should stop flying until the pressure subsides.
Stress and its effects are always with us in the cockpit. Stress will always be a factor, if only subliminally, so we must always be aware of it. On one day, it might present itself as "get-home-itis" - pressure to complete the flight because of some perceived urgency at the destination. On another, it might present itself as some other form of overconfidence or "macho."
What's important to remember is that the mind is also part of the body. It's in the mind that pilot decisions are made, and it is the mind that serves as the focal point for stress. Remember to check yourself out, as well as the aircraft, before you fly.
Wally Miller is president of an aviation training, consulting, and marketing firm in Monument, Colorado. He is a Gold Seal CFI who has been instructing for more than 20 years and flying for more than 40.
Related Articles
