CFI-to-CFI Newsletter - Volume 14 Issue 3 - 11

ASI MESSAGE
UNDER PRESSURE
HOW WOULD yOU REACT?
BY RICHARD G. MCSPADDEN, JR.
Let's go inside your cockpit for a few moments and chair fly.
You're loaded up for a trip and you've got a passenger or two with
you. Pre-takeoff checks complete, you enter the short, narrow
runway, establish the centerline, move to full power, and, once
the engine spools up, release brakes. After a few seconds you
note airspeed alive and focus down the runway, stick or yoke at
pitch neutral, and a little right aileron to counter the quartering
crosswind. Your internal clock signals that you're approaching
rotation speed, you start to glance down at the airspeed indicator
to confirm, but then you hear a loud bang and feel a hard yaw to
the right.
Let's freeze time. If this were a real situation, how would your body react-
physically, mentally, emotionally-and how do you mitigate the negative
effects of this reaction and take advantage of the positive elements so that
your piloting response is optimal? That's the subject of the AOPA Air Safety
Institute's latest seminar Under Pressure: The Mind of a Pilot in Distress.
ASI researched the effects of external pressures on humans and how we
are programmed to respond. Much of the helpful information we found
came from law enforcement. Their training and experiences provide rich
scenarios for studying human reactions under life-and-death stress in
extreme time pressure.
The startle response is automatic, especially if we sense danger. Our bodies
will trigger responses in a fraction of a second and there's nothing we can
do to prevent the biological reaction. What we can do is understand the
reaction, expect it, and learn to work with it. Operating under stress with
extreme time pressure is a critical skill set in aviation.
When startled, our pupils dilate and focus on what our brain perceives as
the most immediate threat; heartbeat increases; breath rate rises; blood
flow is optimized to the large muscles in preparation for fight or flight,
either of which will require maximum physical effort. Our biological
resources are zerosum, meaning, if we direct more blood and oxygen to one
area, we do so at the expense of another area. In essence, as pilots, just when
we need our best mental game, our body optimizes us for physical exertion
at the expense of cognitive processing. Not an ideal allocation of resources
in a cockpit. Our best compensation is to do the hard thinking before the
crisis. Study, train, practice, so we don't need deep cognitive processing for
a successful outcome.
Our natural human functions are designed to operate at 1 G, two to three
knots forward speed, and 0 feet agl. In the aviation sphere, we're going to
fluctuate our G state, thousands of feet in the air, and accelerate to more
than 100 knots. Several notable mishaps have occurred in part because of
the difference in the environment we're optimized for and the environment
CFI-to-CFI Newsletter - Volume 14 Issue 3

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