REENO Aviation Flying Club

Stress during an aviation emergency can cause the smartest and most experienced pilots to make deadly mistakes. Ever wondered why the smartest pilots always appear to be the ones commenting on aviation accidents from the comfort of their lazy chair? Even my writing this article could be considered an oxymoron. Here I am writing about stress being a common deadly factor, while perfectly relaxed and dreaming about my next flight…

Stress is life. In fact, it defines life to a very large extent. An inert being, a form of life that sits still, does not move, does not take action, and basically just “is”, is not alive. Certainly not for long. In order to stay alive, an organism needs to get of their lazy / energy conserving behinds, and go get it. What ever that “it” may be, such as food, or sex for that matter. Life in its essence is the drive to eat and procreate. It is so essential that the very basic life systems that drive rest and stress can be found in the most basic organisms such as bacteria, and have remained preserved throughout the entire evolutionary chain as essential components of life. Molecules and hormones that are associated with stress turn on the cells to go get life source (food, drink) and procreate are found in most living cell systems.

There is inherent risk associated with being alive and stressed. Departing your resting state can cause you to burn energy and not have enough left over. You can run out of fuel, so to say. You can burn up your cylinders trying to go somewhere, and in the human form of it, it causes hypertension, heart disease and a variety of other stress related injuries. These stress mechanisms have become more and more refined over the evolutionary course of life. Stress initially was just the cell starting to move to the next better location to catch a ray of sunshine or some nutritious molecules, then evolved into moving away from injurious areas or situations. In animals and humans, we summarize this as the fight, fright or flight response. Don’t forget that even getting up from the couch while you are reading this to grab a drink from the fridge, and some peanuts, is a stress response. Heart rate up a bit, you walk and use your hands, then put it the energy supply in your stomach. At that point you may reach a rest state again, unless you get so worked up after reading this that it “stresses you out” of course.

Stress is thus always paired with a state of rest. A measured use of stress to grab food or do anything else to sustain life is then paired with a period of recovery and energy preservation. In a more advanced stress and rest system this balance is so well worked out that it hardly is even noticeable. We are awake, and we rest, we eat and we sleep. We know that stress can be immediate and push your body to immense responses deliberately and almost instantaneously. This is very helpful during sports, or when running away from a lion. In a healthy balance this maximally supports the length of our life. Enough rest to recover, and sufficient excitement to get food and drink. In the balance we will always ultimately ‘damage’ our living self through aging, but we may have created fresh and possibly improved copies in our children. Where stress is imbalanced chronically, more damage accumulates over time and results in health problems that we then try to fix with medications, catheterizations, and operations in an attempt to push back on the deleterious effects of chronic stress on our systems.

When stressed we become more focused. This is helpful in many ways. You need to outpace what ever you are trying to catch, or trying to get away from. There is no time to figure out which trajectory is the best to get out of the claws of a lion speeding towards you. You take a mental short cut, waste no time (energy) and sprint for the place your brain tells you to sprint towards… most of our tribe of pre-historic humans will get away. The lion can and will only grab the one that made the least advantageous split second decision. Think about the National Geographic shows where the cheetah runs 80mph, catches the one gazelle that just happened to jump in the wrong direction. Often times all the gazelles get away. But once in a while, just often enough to keep the cheetah alive, one of them gets caught. That dumb one, made the wrong jump and dies.

In our modern lives that all still happens. We get stressed out. We start sweating, we get diarrhea from stress. Our heart rate goes up, we feel a sense of panic. Our brains start “slowing down time”, we get tunnel vision. We fall back on instinct, rather than reasoning. We get flushed, scared and feel like we want to run away. However, getting nice and slippery (and stinky) from sweat and diarrhea is not going to make the lion mess up his attack. Your heart rate and muscle tone is not going to help you get out of the small room at the FBO where you are asked to answer the one question you can’t remember the answer to, and without thinking you just throw something out there in hopes it is the right answer. As the DPE looks over his learned glasses and asks the same question again, you try hard to calm yourself down and compose yourself. It is not until the stress dissipates, and you regain your thoughts, get out of the fright, flight and fight state, you realize that you actually know the answer. You knew it all along. It was actually really easy…

I think that the answer to the question as to why only dumb pilots make mistakes like running out of fuel, or fail to do the obvious is stress. I strongly believe that stress is not helpful in our modern day of dealing with mental and cognitive problem solving. In fact, stress shuts down the very systems we need to think through a problem and solve it. I will attach at the end of this post a link to my presentation to the Winston-Salem pilot group a while ago. There is a link in that presentation to a pilot who successfully landed a Cirrus in a field. His description of what went through his head during all this is amazing when viewed through the lens of all the above. He was lauded as a hero by a lot of people in the aviation community. It was as if the surviving gazelles high-fived each other for making all the correct jumps to survive the lion. But was it really the best choice? Would he have made that choice if he had not been stressed? Was there perhaps an option with a much better survival chance that he promptly excluded during his extremely stressful situation?

I spoke with a pilot not too long ago who ran an engine out of fuel. We make the distinction in aviation between fuel starvation and fuel exhaustion. Strange, if you think about it. Those words really mean the same. We do so, because in one the plane has no more fuel on board, and in the other the engine runs out of fuel, but the plane has fuel on board. This pilot glided for 10 (!) minutes after his engine quit. It arguably was the most stressful time in his piloting life. He is a very accomplished and smart man. He had more than 1000 hrs in this particular plane (Piper 6 seater). He did not think to switch the fuel selector to the other tank, after he made perfect dead stick landing into a soy field. He did not do what all the commentator keyboard warriors obviously were snarking in their online discussion posts. Why did this “dumb” pilot, who obviously was not as current and proficient as they are, forget about his primary training to follow emergency check lists, work through a problem? “First thing you do is change the fuel selector”, “why do checklists even exist if you don’t use them?” and other oft repeated statements were the basic tenure. Obviously, this was Darwinism at work. The dumb one was selected out. The sad truth is that as a result of this mistake, he will likely never fly again because no insurance will let him.

Was he really that dumb? Or was it that he succumbed to this very basic, primal response that is essential for life? In our current cognitive based life where problem solving is so important stress does not serve the same role as it did in the previous 4 billion years of evolution. To put it bluntly, it absolutely does not help you to get all tachycardic, sweaty and to poop yourself in an office situation or in the cockpit. It is this kind of stress in the moment of an acute problem that closes off your brain to obvious logical solutions and makes you ‘forget’ your training, and/or fall back on very primal responses.

It is for this reason that primary learnings are very important. I do believe that training and repeating the basics over and over can help in some situations. For instance, the cirrus pilot discussed above, he fell back to his primary training which very certainly was not in a Cirrus. He did what he was taught initially. He glided, picked a field and performed an emergency landing. What he did not do was follow the cirrus checklist and learnings that happened much later in his flying career. He did not pull the chute. (He would have brought more than 70% less energy to the landing, and statistically had a much better chance of survival if he had). There is absolute merit to simulator training, flight reviews, recency, and all the stuff I discussed in my previous post.

There is a second component to this, which I emphasize when I fly with people. You can train to recognize your own stress response, and learn to respond to it better. This is very, very difficult. It takes deliberate attention and focus during training. It also requires getting stressed, and not get upset about that. The latter is actually the hardest part. When training for combat it is accepted that the training is rigorous, hard, mean and ‘breaks you down’. A soldier is broken down to then be build back up into a fighting machine, is what I am told. They learn to respond to bullets flying, screaming, explosions with ‘combat breathing techniques’ and are made numb to the very real stress of fear of dying. This is unacceptable training in general aviation. Even in my field of surgery it used to be the teaching style that I endured, but has since been abandoned. You may think that I am thus advocating to go back to that and that I think that the current generation is just a bunch of… No. I absolutely do not think that. In fact, I feel that that form of abusive stress training leads to other secondary problems such as freezing and PTSD. I have evolved away from that myself. However, I do think that it is OK to discuss with your flight instructor and ask to be pushed deliberately to the point of incurring a stress response. I think it is incumbent upon that instructor to then call it out, reflect on the stress responses that are noted and offer solutions.

Some solutions I have learned have direct bearing on flying as well. The sage surgeon who walks into an emergency in progress in the OR always as a first step ‘widens the retractors’. He or she precisely does something to overcome the tunnel vision. They would crack a joke. Focus on everything outside of the view of vision of the emergency surgeon. Ask the team for a status update and options. Do we need to resuscitate? Where will we go next? Is an ICU bed available? The aviation corollaries are obvious: Talk to ATC, state your emergency. Where do we land? But also crack a joke, say ‘well this is a crock of -insert word of choice’. Physically lean out and away from the yoke and panel. Take a few deep breaths and engage your thinking brain. Ask a thinking question: ‘what are all the options in this situation?’. While it is true that time is usually not on your hands, the few extra seconds it takes to engage in an internal (or external) discussion to then deliberately arrive at a thought out plan is usually a better plan than the one that immediately popped in your brain. You may be lucky, and be heralded as a hero when your stressed brain picked the right one. You may be the gazelle that gets away. Or you may just die, and everyone will feel so smart in their lazyboy chair. But you are not a fleeing animal, you are a thinking human. This response can be trained, and in my opinion, should be trained for a lot. It is not the dumb pilots that crash in clear view of an obvious solution. It is the pilot that does not recognize the stress, and / or does not resolve his or her stress response in time to think of the obvious. In airline aviation, so I have been told by a wise captain, you can’t widen the retractors- but you can ask the flight attendant to bring you a cup of coffee. In your General Aviation cockpit, you may just have to order that cup of coffee from Starbucks after your successful outcome. The idea remains the same. Maybe just recall this joke, and make yourself chuckle. Relax a bit as a result, and safe your bacon with all that knowledge that then will be in reach.

Cheers, David

PS. This presentation is in PDF form. Not all slides may work correctly. If you want the PPT presentation and promise not to send it all over the world, send me a request via email.