In aviation, pilot stress is common, with three primary sources: physiological stressors, psychological stressors, and environmental stressors. [1] [ unreliable source? ] Professional pilots can experience stress in flight, on the ground during work-related activities, and during personal time because of the influence of their occupation. [2] The job of airline pilot can be extremely stressful due to its often high workload and its responsibilities, including assuring the safety of the thousands of passengers they transport around the world. Chronic levels of stress can negatively impact one's health, job performance and cognitive functioning. [2]
Stress is not a purely negative influence; it can motivate people to improve and help them adapt to a new environment. [3] But accidents become more likely when a pilot is under excessive stress, as it dramatically affects his or her physical, emotional, and mental conditions. Stress "jeopardizes decision-making relevance and cognitive functioning" [4] and it is a prominent cause of pilot error. [5] Being a pilot is considered a unique job that requires managing high workloads and good psychological and physical health. [6] More than many other professionals in roles typically associated with stress, pilots are considered to be highly affected by stress levels. One study reports that 70% of surgeons agreed that stress and fatigue do not impact their performance level, while only 26% of pilots denied that stress influences their performance. [7] Pilots themselves acknowledge how powerful stress can be, yet many accidents and incidents continue to occur and have occurred, such as Asiana Airlines Flight 214, American Airlines Flight 1420, and Polish Air Force Tu-154.
The July 6, 2013, crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 was one of many accidents triggered by stress. During the aircraft's final approach to San Francisco International Airport from Incheon International Airport, the plane hit the edge of the runway and its tail came apart, followed by the fuselage bursting into flames. The trainee pilot flying was "stressed about the approach to the unfamiliar airport and thought the autothrottle was working before the jet came in too low and too slow." [8] He believed that the autothrottle, which is designed to maintain speed, was always on. The trainee pilot should have had full understanding of his flight systems and high mode awareness, but did not. He told the National Transportation Safety Board that he should have studied more. His insufficient knowledge of the flight deck automation and an unfamiliar airport structure caused excessive stress, and the aftermath was disastrous: three passengers died and more than 187 passengers were injured. [9]
On June 1, 1999, American Airlines Flight 1420, was set to land in Little Rock, Arkansas. Captain Richard Buschmann was considered an expert pilot, with over ten thousand hours of flight time. The First Officer was Michael Origel with under five thousand hours of flight time. With a major thunderstorm was in the area, Captain Buschmann decided to change runways due to the high crosswind and rapidly changing wind direction. The pilots were overwhelmed with tasks and the stress of the difficult landing, forgetting to arm the automatic ground spoiler and ground braking systems. [10] It was too difficult to control the aircraft after touchdown and it slid off the runway and collided with a large steel walkway, resulting in the death of Captain Buschmann and 10 passengers, and many additional severe injuries.
Another example is the Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash in April 2010, which killed Polish president Lech Kaczynski. During landing, the pilot, Captain Arkadiusz Protasiuk, had difficulty landing due to severely foggy conditions, but the number of high-status passengers and priority of arriving on time pressured him to continue. Captain Protasiuk brought the aircraft down through the clouds at a too low altitude, resulting in a controlled flight into terrain. The plane crashed into a forest, killing the crew and all the passengers. Analysis by the Interstate Aviation Committee of the cockpit voice recording revealed that there was never a direct command for the pilot to go through with the landing, but the report did show that the pilot was under a "cascade of stress—much of it emanating from his powerful passengers—as Captain Protasiuk slipped below the 'decision altitude'." [11] The accident led to the death of 96 people, due to the high amount of stress being put on the pilot, affecting his mental state and inhibiting him from doing his job.
In the Asiana Airlines Flight 214 study, Kathy Abbott of the Federal Aviation Administration stated that "the data suggests that the highly integrated nature of current flight decks and additional add-on features have increased flight crew knowledge and introduced complexity that sometimes results in pilot confusion and errors during flight deck operation." [8] U.S. investigators instructed Boeing to fix the 777's complex control systems because pilots "no longer fully understand" how aircraft systems work. [12] As technology advances, more and more new instruments are put into the cockpit panel. As these increase, cognitive demands also increase, and pilots are becoming distracted from their primary tasks. [13] Although having various types of information enhances situation awareness, it also overloads sensory channels. [14] Since human's cognitive loads are limited, information overloads increase the risk of flight accidents. Pilots have more difficulty perceiving and processing data when the amount of information is overwhelming. [15]
There are three components of memory: long-term, short-term, and working memory. When stress kicks in, a pilot's working memory is impaired. Stress either limits the amount of resources that can be accessed through working memory or the time which these sources can be accessed are inhibited. [7] When a pilot feels stressed, he or she will notice an increase in heart rate, higher blood pressure, muscle tensions, anxiety and fatigue. [15] These physiological stress symptoms eventually interrupt the pilot's cognitive functions by reducing his or her memory capacity and restraining cue samples. Through a study researchers found that stress greatly affects flight performances including, smoothness and accuracy of landing, ability to multi-task, and being ahead of the plane. [7] Further research shows that under high stress, people are likely to make the same decision he or she has previously made, whether or not it led to a positive or a negative consequence before. [7]
Stress can be caused by environmental, physiological, or psychological factors. Environmental stress can be caused by loud noise, small cockpit space, temperature, or any factors affecting one physically via one's current surroundings. [1] Unpleasant environments can raise one's stress level. Physiological stress is a physical change due to influence of fatigue, anxiety, hunger, or any factors that may change a pilot's biological rhythms. [16] Lastly, psychological factors include personal issues, including experiences, mental health, relationships and any other emotional issues a pilot may face. [16] All these stressors interfere with cognitive activity and limit a pilot's ability to achieve peak performance. It is important to minimize these possible sources of stress to maximize pilots' cognitive loads, which affects their perception, memory, and logical reasoning. [14]
Researchers found that improvements in technology have significantly reduced aviation accidents, but human error still endangers flight safety. An individual reacts to stress in different ways, depending on how one perceives stress. [17] If an individual judges that he or she has resources to cope with demands of the situation, it will be evaluated as a challenge. On the other hand, if an individual believes situational demands outweigh the resources, he or she will evaluate it as a threat, leading to poorer performance. Under the threat response, researchers stated that pilots became more distracted with their controls and had higher tendencies to scan unnecessary instruments. [18]
One type of decision-making error a pilot may make is a plan continuation error (PCE). PCE is defined as an "erroneous behavior due to failure to revise a flight plan despite emerging evidence that suggests it is no longer safe." [4] The French Land Transport Accident Investigation Bureau (BEA) stated that 41.5% of casualties in general aviation were caused by "get-home-itis syndrome", when a pilot decides to continue to their planned destination no matter what it takes. [4] A pilot must use their own judgment to go-around whenever it is necessary, but he or she often fails to do so. Through the study, it was found that mental workload of stress and heart rate increases when making go-around decisions. A pilot feels pressured and stressed by the obligation to get passengers to their destinations at the right time and to continue the flight as planned. When choosing between productivity and safety, pilots' risk assessments can be influenced unconsciously. The American Airlines Flight 1420 accident is one example caused by PCE; although the flight crew knew that approaching severe thunderstorms made their original flight plan dangerous, they continued on.
Stress can narrow the focus of attention in a good way and in a bad way. Stress helps to simplify a pilot's task and enables him or her to focus on major issues by eliminating nonessential information. [19] In other words, a pilot can simplify information and react accordingly to major cues only. However, when a pilot exceeds his or her cognitive load, it will eventually narrow his or her attention too much and cause inattentional deafness: The pilot will mainly focus on doing the primary task and ignore secondary tasks, such as audible alarms and spoken instructions. [20]
Military pilots experience a more fast-paced and stressful career compared to airline and general aviation pilots. Military pilots experience significantly greater stress levels due to significant reliability and performance expectations. [21] They hold a unique position in the workforce that includes peak physical and mental condition, high intelligence and extensive training. All military pilots, at times, must work under extreme conditions, experiencing high levels of stress, especially in a war zone. Soldiers are made to endure punishment and go through the most unthinkable situations. They are expected to continue with their job and at times completely ignore their own emotions. After initial training, the military completely reforms the individual, and in most cases incredible stress management skills are formed. The soldier is then sent off for further training, in this case to be a pilot, where they are tested and challenged even further to either fail or become one of the best.
Military pilots hold a lot of responsibility. Their jobs can include passenger or cargo transport, reconnaissance missions, or attacking from the air or flight training, all while expected to be in perfect mental and physical condition. These jobs place a responsibility on the pilot to avoid mistakes as millions of dollars, lives, or whole operations are at risk. At times stress does over take the pilot [22] and emotions and human error can occur.
There are many occurrences of pilots bombing allied forces in friendly fire incidents out of error and having to live with the consequences.[ citation needed ]
The stress of the job itself or of any mistake made can hugely affect one's life outside work. Millions of veterans struggle with post-traumatic stress injuries, unhealthy coping strategies such as alcohol or substance abuse [23] and in the worst of cases, suicide, which is very common. Many studies and help programs [24] have been put in place, but there are many different cases and people that it is impossible to help everyone. Stress overcomes even the strongest, most highly trained pilots and can take the worst toll.
Everyone deals with stress in a different manner, but military pilots stand out on their own with unique stress-reducing and problem-solving skills. Their main strategy is to find the problem causing the stress and solve it immediately, so that they do not have to move to a secondary option, which consumes time they do not have. [25] This is what they are taught in flight school; a sensor goes off and they immediately fix the problem. The main problem appears when pilots are going high speed or undergoing complicated maneuvers. [26] Most times they are moving much faster than a human could even think, leaving a lot of room for human error. When an error occurs, however big or small, they can take on immense guilt for any problems that were caused, depending on their personality. [27] This can affect their mental state and ability to continue their job. [28] Stress can also take a physical toll on a pilot's body, for reasons such as grinding of their teeth in difficult situations, [29] or bladder problems when the pilot is flying under a higher G-force or for a long distance. [30]
Beginning in the 1950s, as planes became mechanically more reliable, human error became the main cause of aviation accidents. [31] As stress and fatigue continue to be an issue in the aviation industry, various training programs have been developed to mitigate their effects. National Aeronautics and Space Administration has pointed out human limitations and emphasized the importance of teamwork. [31] Crew resource management is a type of training conducted to teach a flight crew different behavioral strategies, such as situational awareness, stress management, and decision-making. [32] When pilots are being hired, recruiters not only look at pilots' technical skills, but also at pilots' ability to learn from errors and evaluate how well they coordinate with other crew members.
Stress management consists of a wide spectrum of techniques and psychotherapies aimed at controlling a person's level of psychological stress, especially chronic stress, generally for the purpose of improving the function of everyday life. Stress produces numerous physical and mental symptoms which vary according to each individual's situational factors. These can include a decline in physical health, such as headaches, chest pain, fatigue, sleep problems, and depression. The process of stress management is a key factor that can lead to a happy and successful life in modern society. Stress management provides numerous ways to manage anxiety and maintain overall well-being.
Aviation safety is the study and practice of managing risks in aviation. This includes preventing aviation accidents and incidents through research, educating air travel personnel, passengers and the general public, as well as the design of aircraft and aviation infrastructure. The aviation industry is subject to significant regulation and oversight.
Crew resource management or cockpit resource management (CRM) is a set of training procedures for use in environments where human error can have devastating effects. CRM is primarily used for improving aviation safety and focuses on interpersonal communication, leadership, and decision making in aircraft cockpits. Its founder is David Beaty, a former Royal Air Force and a BOAC pilot who wrote The Human Factor in Aircraft Accidents (1969). Despite the considerable development of electronic aids since then, many principles he developed continue to prove effective.
In the field of human factors and ergonomics, human reliability is the probability that a human performs a task to a sufficient standard. Reliability of humans can be affected by many factors such as age, physical health, mental state, attitude, emotions, personal propensity for certain mistakes, and cognitive biases.
In aviation, pilot error generally refers to an action or decision made by a pilot that is a substantial contributing factor leading to an aviation accident. It also includes a pilot's failure to make a correct decision or take proper action. Errors are intentional actions that fail to achieve their intended outcomes. The Chicago Convention defines the term "accident" as "an occurrence associated with the operation of an aircraft [...] in which [...] a person is fatally or seriously injured [...] except when the injuries are [...] inflicted by other persons." Hence the definition of "pilot error" does not include deliberate crashing.
Single-pilot resource management (SRM) is defined as the art and science of managing all the resources available to a single-pilot to ensure that the successful outcome of the flight is never in doubt. SRM includes the concepts of Aeronautical Decision Making (ADM), Risk Management (RM), Task Management (TM), Automation Management (AM), Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) Awareness, and Situational Awareness (SA). SRM training helps the pilot maintain situational awareness by managing the automation and associated aircraft control and navigation tasks. This enables the pilot to accurately assess and manage risk and make accurate and timely decisions.
Fatigue is a major safety concern in many fields, but especially in transportation, because fatigue can result in disastrous accidents. Fatigue is considered an internal precondition for unsafe acts because it negatively affects the human operator's internal state. Research has generally focused on pilots, truck drivers, and shift workers.
Colgan Air Flight 3407 was a scheduled passenger flight from Newark, New Jersey, US to Buffalo, New York, US on February 12, 2009. Colgan Air staffed and maintained the aircraft used on the flight that was scheduled, marketed, and sold by Continental Airlines under its Continental Connection brand. The aircraft, a Bombardier Q400, entered an aerodynamic stall from which it did not recover and crashed into a house at 6038 Long Street in Clarence Center, New York at 10:17 pm EST, killing all 49 passengers and crew on board, as well as one person inside the house.
Human factors are the physical or cognitive properties of individuals, or social behavior which is specific to humans, and which influence functioning of technological systems as well as human-environment equilibria. The safety of underwater diving operations can be improved by reducing the frequency of human error and the consequences when it does occur. Human error can be defined as an individual's deviation from acceptable or desirable practice which culminates in undesirable or unexpected results. Human factors include both the non-technical skills that enhance safety and the non-technical factors that contribute to undesirable incidents that put the diver at risk.
[Safety is] An active, adaptive process which involves making sense of the task in the context of the environment to successfully achieve explicit and implied goals, with the expectation that no harm or damage will occur. – G. Lock, 2022
Dive safety is primarily a function of four factors: the environment, equipment, individual diver performance and dive team performance. The water is a harsh and alien environment which can impose severe physical and psychological stress on a diver. The remaining factors must be controlled and coordinated so the diver can overcome the stresses imposed by the underwater environment and work safely. Diving equipment is crucial because it provides life support to the diver, but the majority of dive accidents are caused by individual diver panic and an associated degradation of the individual diver's performance. – M.A. Blumenberg, 1996
Selection, training, cohesion and psychosocial adaptation influence performance and, as such, are relevant factors to consider while preparing for costly, long-duration spaceflight missions in which the performance objectives will be demanding, endurance will be tested and success will be critical.
Automation bias is the propensity for humans to favor suggestions from automated decision-making systems and to ignore contradictory information made without automation, even if it is correct. Automation bias stems from the social psychology literature that found a bias in human-human interaction that showed that people assign more positive evaluations to decisions made by humans than to a neutral object. The same type of positivity bias has been found for human-automation interaction, where the automated decisions are rated more positively than neutral. This has become a growing problem for decision making as intensive care units, nuclear power plants, and aircraft cockpits have increasingly integrated computerized system monitors and decision aids to mostly factor out possible human error. Errors of automation bias tend to occur when decision-making is dependent on computers or other automated aids and the human is in an observatory role but able to make decisions. Examples of automation bias range from urgent matters like flying a plane on automatic pilot to such mundane matters as the use of spell-checking programs.
Sleeping in space is part of space medicine and mission planning, with impacts on the health, capabilities and morale of astronauts.
Mental health in aviation is a major concern among airlines, regulators, and passengers. This topic gained more attention after the 2015 Germanwings crash, which was deliberately caused by the plane's copilot. Little data exists on mental health in aviation, but steps to gather relevant information and provide better solutions are underway.
In aviation safety, threat and error management (TEM) is an overarching safety management approach that assumes that pilots will naturally make mistakes and encounter risky situations during flight operations. Rather than try to avoid these threats and errors, its primary focus is on teaching pilots to manage these issues so they do not impair safety. Its goal is to maintain safety margins by training pilots and flight crews to detect and respond to events that are likely to cause damage (threats) as well as mistakes that are most likely to be made (errors) during flight operations.
Aviation accident analysis is performed to determine the cause of errors once an accident has happened. In the modern aviation industry, it is also used to analyze a database of past accidents in order to prevent an accident from happening. Many models have been used not only for the accident investigation but also for educational purpose.
In aviation, a source of stress that comes from the environment is known as an environmental stressor. Stress is defined as a situation, variable, or circumstance that interrupts the normal functioning of an individual and, most of the time, causes a threat. It can be related not only to mental health, but also to physical health.
Pilot decision making, also known as aeronautical decision making (ADM), is a process that aviators perform to effectively handle troublesome situations that are encountered. Pilot decision-making is applied in almost every stage of the flight as it considers weather, air spaces, airport conditions, estimated time of arrival and so forth. During the flight, employers pressure pilots regarding time and fuel restrictions since a pilots’ performance directly affects the company’s revenue and brand image. This pressure often hinders a pilot's decision-making process leading to dangerous situations as 50% to 90% of aviation accidents are the result of pilot error.
Culture can affect aviation safety through its effect on how the flight crew deals with difficult situations; cultures with lower power distances and higher levels of individuality can result in better aviation safety outcomes. In higher power cultures subordinates are less likely to question their superiors. The crash of Korean Air Flight 801 in 1997 was attributed to the pilot's decision to land despite the junior officer's disagreement, while the crash of Avianca Flight 052 was caused by the failure to communicate critical low-fuel data between pilots and controllers, and by the failure of the controllers to ask the pilots if they were declaring an emergency and assist the pilots in landing the aircraft. The crashes have been blamed on aspects of the national cultures of the crews.
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) defines fatigue as "A physiological state of reduced mental or physical performance capability resulting from sleep loss or extended wakefulness, circadian phase, or workload." The phenomenon places great risk on the crew and passengers of an airplane because it significantly increases the chance of pilot error. Fatigue is particularly prevalent among pilots because of "unpredictable work hours, long duty periods, circadian disruption, and insufficient sleep". These factors can occur together to produce a combination of sleep deprivation, circadian rhythm effects, and 'time-on task' fatigue. Regulators attempt to mitigate fatigue by limiting the number of hours pilots are allowed to fly over varying periods of time.
Aviation psychology, also known as aerospace psychology, is a branch of psychology that studies psychological aspects of aviation, increasing efficiency improving selection of applicants for occupations, identification of psychological causes of aircraft accidents, and application of cognitive psychology to understand human behaviors, actions, cognitive and emotional processes in aviation, and interaction between employees. Aviation psychology originated at the beginning of the 1920s with the development of aviation medicine and work psychology in the USSR. Human separation from earth leads to a drastic change in spatial orientation; accelerations, drops in barometric pressure, changes in atmospheric composition, can have a substantial effect on the nervous system, and requires uninterrupted concentration and rapid decisions. Currently, research in aviation psychology develops within the framework of engineering psychology.
{{cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(help)[ dead link ]{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link){{cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(help){{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)