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More than half the audience raised their hands. But, I think if she had been speaking to a room full of pilots, every hand would have gone up. Oh, we’ve all had those beautiful, smooth-air flights when the airplane behaves perfectly; it just doesn’t happen very often. Usually, some stressor is present, whether it’s turbulence, an erratic engine gauge, or the person sitting in the cockpit with you.

In her 2013 presentation, McGonigal describes a study performed on 30,000 adults over eight years. The adults were asked two questions: How much stress have you experienced in the past year? Do you believe stress is bad for your health? The study later took a look at public death records of the participants and found that people who experienced a moderate amount of stress had a 43 percent increased risk of premature death. However, that statistic was completely mitigated in the group of people who believed stress was good for them. They actually had the same death rates as the ones who reported experiencing little stress in their lives. Therefore, McGonigal says, the cause of death of the 43 percent was actually the belief that stress is bad for them.

When we are stressed, our body has a physiological response that includes an increased breathing rate and pounding heart. And, McGonigal reports, those who believe stress is bad for them also experience a constriction of their arteries, which is not a routinely healthy state. However, those who enjoy a good stressful challenge have arteries that stay wide open during the event, similar to the way our arteries behave when we experience joy. People with a healthy stress response think: My heart is pounding because my body is rising to the occasion of this high workload. My heavy breathing is providing the extra oxygen I need to perform well here. McGonigal says that during stressful events, our bodies also do something else interesting. They release oxytocin, a hormone that drives us to seek contact from others. In other words, our body is saying, “Don’t go this alone. Get help.”

When we think of overly stressful flying environments, we have to discuss N4252G, a Cirrus SR20 that crashed during a go-around at Houston’s Hobby airport (HOU) in June 2016. The 332-hour private pilot was travelling with her husband and brother-in-law to visit a family member undergoing cancer treatment. Hobby is a busy, Class Bravo airport with multiple intersecting runways and heavy airline traffic. There was a 16-knot gusty crosswind that day. Talk about stress. But you haven’t even heard about the flight yet.

When the pilot first contacted Houston tower, she was cleared to land on Runway 4 and told to follow a Boeing 737, caution, wake turbulence. She was also given maximum forward airspeed for another airliner behind her. Shortly thereafter, she was told to execute a go-around and enter a right base for Runway 35 and warned of another 737 on final for Runway 4 that she would need to land before. She was then given a traffic advisory for a different inbound 737 to pass behind before turning to land on Runway 35. When she announced traffic in sight, the controller gave her the option to follow that traffic and land on Runway 4, which she accepted. (Are you getting confused yet? It’s a lot to keep up with, and I’m sitting on my living room couch, not trying to navigate an SR20 around multiple 737s). The story continues with another runway swap, more traffic advisories, and another go-around when the pilot came in too high to make a safe landing. The next time she was sequenced around, she came in too high again for Runway 35 and executed a third go-around, during which she was told to swap to a low tight pattern for Runway 4 and given some more traffic to find. In the middle of this sequence, the pilot retracted the flaps at too slow of an airspeed and stall/spun into the parking lot of an adjacent hardware store. The AOPA Air Safety Institute describes the accident in Accident Case Study: Traffic Pattern Tragedy (airsafetyinstitute.org/ACS/patterntragedy).

There are so many problems with this scenario, but I do wonder, did the pilot think of her pounding heart and increased breathing rate as her body rising to help her out of a tight spot, or was she feeling her chest constrict and starting to doubt her abilities? What if she had listened to that rise in oxytocin—which tells us to ask for help, McGonigal says—and told ATC she needed some assistance and priority landing? Would things have ended differently for the three people who died that day?

In our routinely stressful aviation environment, be certain in the belief that a challenge is good for you. Your body is perfectly designed to rise to the occasion. So, be calm, and fly the airplane. You were made for this.

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