By Stephen Pradarelli
Confession time.
One of the reasons I got into flying was--fear of flying.
While the other passengers on commercial flights I took were casually reading a book, doing the crossword, or dozing in their seats (the fools!), I kept my eyes laser-focused on the wings for a sign of impending catastrophe. I was ready to mash the flight attendant call button at the first sign of trouble, especially if we hit turbulence.
I was deluding myself, of course. The airplanes took off and landed just fine without my "help." But fixating on what might go wrong gave my anxiety somewhere to go while hurtling through the sky at 30,000 feet and 700 knots.
It seems silly in hindsight. Today, turbulence feels more like an amusement park ride, whether I'm piloting one of my flying club's Cessna 172s or riding in the window seat of an Airbus A380.
That doesn't mean stress has disappeared from my flying.
It still visits from time to time, especially when something unexpected happens: an aircraft suddenly enters the pattern without announcing its position; the wind shifts from crosswind to tailwind just as I'm flaring; a controller rattles off a rapid-fire clearance while I'm already managing three other things.
Ironically, the airplane usually isn't the hardest part. Sometimes it's the talking.
A burst of radio traffic, a frequency change at exactly the wrong moment, or the fear of sounding incompetent on the radio can make it feel as though someone has pressed a disconnect button in my brain. Suddenly the words I know are harder to find, instructions don't seem quite as clear, and my workload feels twice as heavy.
As it turns out, that's not a character flaw. It's the basis of a field of study called human factors.
Learning to recognize and manage stress is one of the central goals of human factors research. One of the first places stress often reveals itself isn't in how we manipulate the controls--it's in how we communicate. Missed calls. Incorrect readbacks. Forgotten frequencies. Long pauses before responding. Sooner or later, every pilot encounters a situation that pushes their mental bandwidth to--or beyond--its limits.
Unchecked, stress doesn't just affect our flying. It can degrade our radio communications, turning an already challenging situation into a dangerous one.
Missing the Forest for the Trees
Human factors accidents rarely happen because pilots don't know what to do. They happen because stress, workload, distraction, and communication demands temporarily exceed the brain's ability to process information.
When workload spikes, the brain narrows its attention (sometimes called attention tunneling). That can be helpful for a few seconds, but it comes with a cost: other information gets filtered out.
In aviation, that often shows up first on the radio. We miss part of a clearance, read back the wrong altitude, forget the frequency we were just assigned, or become so focused on one task that we stop hearing the bigger picture.
Stress doesn't usually make pilots forget how to fly. But it can make them communicate less clearly.
Deadly Distractions
In 1990, on a flight from Bogota, Colombia, to JFK International Airport in New York, the crew of Avianca Flight 52 became increasingly stressed because of weather delays, fuel concerns, and workload. Their communication with ATC were ambiguous at times so that controllers were never clearly informed the aircraft was nearly out of fuel.
The aircraft, carrying 149 passengers and a crew of nine, ultimately crashed after fuel exhaustion. While there were survivors, many of them were severely injured in the accident.
Robert L. Dismukes, a former chief scientist of NASA’s Human Factors Division and one of the leading aviation psychologists in this area, conducted a study that found that acute stress can negatively impact everything from cognition, attention and memory to communication and performance.
Pilots under stress may be more susceptible to the "attentional tunneling” I mentioned earlier--focusing on one problem while missing critical cues that may offer an answer.
“During emergency and other highly challenging situations, pilots may be cognitively impaired so that they are less able to seek out information, process and assess it; manage concurrent tasks, recall facts from memory, and communicate and coordinate with other crew members,” the study by Dismukes says.
In other words, stress doesn't erase knowledge. But it can temporarily block its access.
The Flight Cognition Laboratory at NASA found that cockpit errors occur not only when workload is extremely high, but also when pilots must manage multiple competing tasks and interruptions. Even when enough time exists to complete all tasks, the research showed that pilots still make errors while trying to prioritize and switch between them.
Sometimes, the errors are easily corrected. (Who among us hasn’t occasionally radioed ATC on a frequency one digit off from the correct one, only to realize the error and correct it before anyone noticed?)
Other times, further NASA research has shown, interruptions, distractions, and lapses of attention can be the first critical domino that leads to an aviation accident. The complexity of monitoring multiple tasks while dealing with competing demands makes pilots especially vulnerable to missing critical cues.
While many of us pride ourselves on our ability to "multitask," neuroscience suggests that’s a bit of a myth. Rather than doing several things simultaneously, our brains rapidly switch attention between competing tasks. Under stress, those switches become slower, less efficient, and much more prone to error--especially when radio calls, navigation, and aircraft control all compete for the same limited mental bandwidth.
Human Factors research aims to make it easier for pilots to do the right thing under challenging circumstances, and harder to do the wrong one.
If stress can temporarily disconnect parts of our thinking, the question becomes: How do we reconnect them before a small communication error becomes a much larger problem?
Fortunately, decades of Human Factors research, and the accumulated wisdom of experienced pilots, offer some remarkably practical techniques.
Assess the Stress
The first way to address a problem is to admit you have one. But stress can creep up on us and may not seem as obvious as we’d expect. So it’s important to notice signs that we may be heading for trouble--even if that means deciding not to fly some days.
My personal “stress scan” usually starts during my drive to the airport, when I go through the IMSAFE personal checklist: Illness, Medicine, Stress, Alcohol, Fatigue, and Emotions.
Even though stress may not be evident as such, its ingredients may be: a poor night’s sleep, a fight with a partner the night before, maybe a drippy nose that could be allergies or could be something more.
Individually, these may be no big deal. Collectively, they can sap some of the attention and energy we need to fly safely.
Once at the airport, after performing my preflight, I turn to PAVE (Pilot, Aircraft, enVironment, and External Pressures) to do a further gut check on my readiness to fly. Is the crosswind a few knots beyond my comfort level? Am I in too much of a hurry to get to my destination?
Even if we give ourselves the all-clear to take off, our vigilance shouldn’t end once we’re airborne. There can be signs in flight that the operating system between our ears is overheating. Missing radio calls, losing track of frequencies, and forgetting checklist items are just a few signs that we’re approaching our cognitive limits and getting behind the airplane.
If we find ourselves making “stupid” mistakes because of workload or other factors, it’s important to go back to the basics so we can clear some mental clutter and decide whether, and how, to proceed to our intended destination.
Fly First, Talk Second
As every pilot knows, we always give priority to aviating (flying the aircraft safely) before concerning ourselves with navigating and communicating. In reality, we sometimes perform these tasks near-simultaneously, but you get the point: there’ll be nowhere to go, and no one to talk to, if we drive the plane into a volcano because we’re distracted.
Assuming wings are level, the instruments look good, and we’re honoring the rules of physics, it’s time to break down our work into more manageable pieces.
Talk Yourself Through the Workload
Talking to yourself, out loud, may sound a bit strange. But vocalizing how we plan to respond to necessary tasks in a stressful situation serves two purposes. First, it regulates our breathing (and keeps hyperventilation at bay, if that’s a potential risk). Second, it builds a pause between thought and action and helps restore a broader view of what's happening in the cockpit and outside the airplane.
Many experienced pilots narrate priorities, like they might if they were undergoing a flight review and wanted to impress the CFI with their genius.
"Let's level off first."
"Let’s deal with the GPS after the climb."
“Everything’s in the green, so let’s step through the checklist.”
Remember that if you're overwhelmed, the radio can become a workload-management tool instead of another source of workload.
If you’re in contact with ATC and feeling over-tasked, under most circumstances you can ask the controller to “stand by” if they’ve given an instruction or otherwise want to talk to you.
And if you’re truly tied in knots managing the aircraft, you can tell ATC that you’re “unable right now.”
Controllers would rather wait ten seconds than receive an incorrect readback or put you as the pilot in jeopardy.
If you find yourself in a particularly overwhelming situation, you can also ask ATC for help. They can provide radar vectors to the nearest suitable airport, help keep you clear of other traffic, provide the latest weather information, and otherwise reduce the cockpit workload.
Use Checklists to Free Up Bandwidth
Every item that lives on paper (or on your iPad) is one less thing you have to maintain in working memory, freeing some of your attention, say, when the frequency gets busy or your workload suddenly spikes.
Consider speaking the items on the checklist out loud, per my earlier point. In stressful moments, it’s easy to skim a checklist rather than actually see and register each action item in it. Verbalizing tasks can help ensure they break through the fog of distraction (especially important for critical moments like lowering landing gear or making sure you move the mixture to full rich before landing).
Protect the Sterile Cockpit
If you’re flying with others, as pilot in command it’s your right--and in their best interest--to demand your passengers not add to your stress during the most critical phases of flight, including takeoff, the initial climb, and landing. This not only includes periods of non-critical talking, but fiddling with cameras or phones or doing anything else that can negatively impact your focus.
Reconnecting the Brain
Every pilot eventually encounters a flight where everything seems to happen at once. The weather changes. The traffic increases. The radios become busy. The airplane suddenly feels as though it's flying twice as fast.
The good news is that those limits are well understood. Human Factors research reminds us that stress doesn't usually cause spectacular failures. More often, it quietly narrows our attention, clutters our working memory, and makes communication less effective.
Fortunately, the same research also shows that simple habits like slowing down, verbalizing priorities, using checklists, protecting the sterile cockpit, and remembering that it's ok to tell ATC "stand by" or "unable" can interrupt that cycle before it becomes dangerous.
The next time the radios come alive and your workload spikes, remember that your goal isn't to eliminate stress. It's to recognize when your brain is trying to press its own disconnect button.
Fly the airplane. Slow the situation down. Then key the microphone. By then, you'll probably have something much more useful to say.
The Debrief: The most dangerous human factor in aviation isn't lack of knowledge or skill. It's the moment when stress, distraction, and workload quietly erode the mental bandwidth we need to use those tools successfully. The safest pilots aren’t invincible--they simply recognize their overload early and deliberately reduce the workload before it reduces them.
Have an idea for a Left Seat? Email Stephen at spradarelli@gmail.com.