A survey of commercial pilots identified several main sources of stress — Page 139, Lesson 215

I want to walk you through the sources of stress that are specific to pilots, and then how stress actually affects your performance in the cockpit. This is a critical topic because understanding where stress comes from and what it does to you is the first step in managing it. Let's start with the organizational stress sources in pilots. A survey of commercial pilots identified several main sources of stress. One of them is a lack of control or disruption of events in their lives. Another is scheduling and rostering — the unpredictable or demanding patterns of when you fly. There's also insufficient hands-on flying, which I'll come back to in a moment. Anxiety over courses and checks is a big one — the pressure of recurrent training and proficiency checks. The home-to-work interface — balancing your personal life with your flying career — is another source. Career prospects and achievements — worrying about progression, promotions, or stagnation. Lack of responsibility and decision making — feeling like you're not truly in charge. And finally, fatigue and flying patterns — the cumulative effect of irregular hours and long duty days. Now, I want to highlight that item about insufficient flying, because it's particularly significant. Here's the reality: the modern airliner is most efficiently and economically operated by automatic control. In fact, it is the policy of many airlines that the flight management system should operate the aircraft for more than 96% of its flight time. That means for every 100 hours of flight, the autopilot and flight management computer are flying for over 96 of them. Now, modern systems and their backups are undoubtedly extremely reliable. But many pilots are worried that the systems may fail, and they're unsure of their ability to manage the aircraft themselves — because they get so little practice. A pilot flying the maximum allowable duty hours may have very little actual hands-on time per month. So the very technology that makes the operation efficient also creates a stressor: the fear of losing that automation and having to hand-fly under pressure. Let's move to stress effects. Stress has effects on the body, on the mind, and on health — and therefore on the performance of the individual. The short-term effects of a sudden source of stress are caused by what we call the 'fight or flight' response. That's your body's automatic reaction to a perceived threat: your heart rate increases, your breathing quickens, your muscles tense, and you're ready to either fight the threat or run from it. That's useful in some situations, but in the cockpit it can be problematic if it's triggered by a non-physical threat like a system failure or a difficult approach. Now let's look at the relationship between stress and performance. Figure 7.5 shows this relationship. Like the arousal/performance graph we've discussed before, it is an inverted U curve. But here's the key difference: there is a "break point". Let me walk you through it. When there is little or no stress, there is a drop in vigilance and performance is poor. You're under-stimulated, you get complacent, you miss things. As stress increases, performance increases — up to the optimum. That optimum is the "break point". After that break point, if stress continues to rise, performance is degraded. So you have a curve that goes up, hits a peak, and then comes back down. The break point is that peak — the ideal level of stress where you're performing at your best. Beyond it, you're over-stressed and your performance suffers. So to summarize: too little stress and you're not alert enough. The right amount of stress — medium stress — and you're motivated and performing at your peak. Too much stress — intense stress — and your performance degrades. That's the core concept you need to take away from this section.