Stress/Anxiety Driven Accidents

Marty,

That's good stuff. As a police instructor I spend a fair amount of time training recruits and officers about what happens to the body/mind under high stress. Tunnel vision and auditory exclusion are two of the most common things reported by officers who have been involved in shootings or other life and death situations. It only makes sense that the officer's attention is narrowly focused on what is about to kill him (e.g. the gun in the suspects hand). I never considered the opposite where the focus is on salvation - the runway in your scenario but it makes perfect sense.

At the range we train officers to do an exaggerated scan after each string of fire in order to break the tunnel vision, just as you describe. Hopefully, when under stress, they will do as they were trained. It is important to do this type of training from the beginning, whether shooting or flying. History has shown that the "law of primacy" takes over when under extreme stress. That is to say, one automatically reverts to the way they were first trained, whether that training was right or wrong. It is difficult to "untrain" bad initial training even with repeated remediation. For example, there are instances of officers raising their non-shooting hand in the midst of a gunfight when their weapons malfunctioned because that's what they were taught to do when they first learned to shoot.

Stress inoculation training is what we do to prepare officers for conflict. Role players, paintball type guns and various scenarios are eye opening events for trainers and trainees, alike. Repeated exposure to this type of training results in better tactics and decision making. In the aviation world simulators have an important role. Maybe someone can (or already has) create a bunch of emergency scenarios for Condor. If its good for airline pilots, it ought to be good for us.

Finally, along with the other side effects of extreme stress there is what has been called the "jangle effect". This is the inability to carry on dialogue, even internally. Officers have reported the inability to "get the words out" on the radio or to their partners. Doing even simple calculations like glide ratios can also be quite difficult. If there is time, consciously controlling your breathing can help with this. I really like your idea of having a student (or any pilot) actually speak out loud as he is making decisions. It lets you know the decision making process that is going on and, if things get quiet, you now there might be a problem. I often find myself talking out loud as I prepare for landing.

Keep up the good work and thanks for your contributions.