In our previous article, “Overcoming the Human Aviation Challenges in Mission-Critical Operations,” we explored the physical, technical, and physiological challenges faced by helicopter operators. To deepen our understanding of these issues, we’ve interviewed aviation psychologist Eleonora Avi. Dr. Avi provides expert insights into how stress, fatigue, and cognitive overload affect decision-making and situational awareness in aviation. Her perspectives on the psychological aspects of different mission types and the potential role of AI in addressing human factors complement our earlier discussion, offering a comprehensive view of the human element in flight safety.
How do stress and fatigue specifically impact an operator’s decision-making process and situational awareness during mission-critical operations?
🎤Stress and fatigue have a significant impact on safety during flight operations, due to their very strong impact on working memory. Working memory is a space in our mind where we process information.
That’s the place where we integrate the information gathered from the environment around us with the information stored in our long-term memory, e.g. previous experiences, training and so on and so forth. Basically, we try to understand the situation we are in, based on the information we have and on the mental model that we activate. A mental model is a “standard” model we have regarding a specific situation. Just to make it clear: for example, when we go to the library, we have a mental model of what going to the library is like, and we all know that we go there to read books and we need to keep silent or at least to speak with a very low voice.
That’s just an example of what a mental model might be. Another example: we all have a mental model of what a tree is. If I ask you to think about a tree, perhaps you will think about a pine tree or an apple tree or other trees, but you won’t think about a rose or a daisy, for example, because we all share the same mental model of what a tree is, i.e. a tree is something that has roots, a trunk covered with bark, and branches . It is very important that mental models are shared among all team members, when we work in teams.
The process of understanding a situation in order to make the right decisions starts from perceiving the right things in the environment around us. Sometimes, if we don’t expect to see something, our perception may be deceived and we could miss important information. So, we must be very careful when scanning the environment around us. We need to look also for the unexpected.
Integrating the information coming from the environment with the correct mental model that explains the situation is precisely what we call situational awareness.
And at the basis of situational awareness, we have this intensive use of perception, attention – which is a sort of “filter” for perception – and working memory.
This means that fatigue and distress heavily affect our working memory, since they both impair our ability to think, perceive, use our attentional resources and our working memory. And distress is also “switching on” another part of our brain that is called the limbic system. This system is connected to the fight or flight response. Basically, when we are stressed, the reaction of our body is the same as if we were in danger.
And when we are in danger, we are not “programmed” to think, but to “fight or flight”, and this physiological reaction can severely impair our cognitive skills such as decision-making and situational awareness.
Fatigue, on the other hand, has a particularly insidious effect. Like distress, fatigue gradually impairs our cognitive function, but also “switches off” the part of our brain responsible for recognising fatigue itself. This means that, by the time we realise we’re tired, we may have already made many mistakes. This delayed awareness of fatigue can lead to compromised performance and safety.
Both stress and fatigue can interact, compounding their negative effects. For instance, prolonged stress can lead to fatigue, creating a cycle that further impairs cognitive function and decision-making abilities.
So, we really need to consider fatigue and stress in our risk assessment, for example. We are used to performing risk assessment based on very technical stuff, such as the kind of operations we might perform and the physical environment and so on and so forth. But we should also perform a sort of self-assessment on ourselves, i.e. on the person who is going to perform the job, to also take into account that we could be more at risk if we are fatigued or stressed. But we have a cultural issue in Italy – and not only in Italy. People flying are the “superheroes”, and it means that they can never be tired and they can never face difficulties. And that’s a problem, because it becomes really difficult to admit that we are tired or stressed out, if we are the “superheroes”.
In your experience, how do different types of missions (e.g., SAR, law enforcement, military) present unique psychological challenges for airborne operators?
🎤Every mission has a different kind of stress and fatigue. But not only stress and fatigue: I really think that now it is really important to start talking also about emotions, because they have an impact on safety. We are all talking about non-technical skills such as communication, situational awareness, decision-making, problem-solving and so on and so forth. But, actually, emotional skills have got an impact on both technical and non-technical skills.
Try to imagine that, before going to work, you have a very bad discussion with your partner, for example, asking for divorce. And then you go to work and you have to fly. How would you perform your flight on that day? No one is really considering that.
Stress is not the only factor. I mean, of course emotions can stress you. But stress and emotions are not the same. You can also be very, very sad or very, very happy.
And, please trust me, your performance won’t be so good in either case, because also happiness can stress you. But that’s another story.
While I’m not an expert in military missions, I know much better civilian operations, particularly Search and Rescue (SAR) missions, which have some overlap with military operations.
And in SAR missions, what can really be a challenge? Well, we have various factors. For example, unpredictability of the mission. You don’t know when you will be activated for the mission.
You don’t know beforehand where you must go, or for what you must leave. Is it a life-threatening medical condition? Â Is there a person injured in the mountains? Or is this person a very experienced hiker, not injured, who found a safe place and he/she is waiting for the rescue teams to reach them? I mean, there are a variety of unpredictable elements during search and rescue missions. And, on top of this, you can never be sure about how reliable the information you have been given is.
Dispatch centers do their best in order to gather information from the people calling them for help. But it happens quite often that this information is not so precise, for example the information regarding the localisation of the target. And this can be frustrating. Besides, when flying helicopters and you’re looking for the target, you usually fly at a very low speed and low altitude, the “Dead Man’s Curve”, more or less the worst condition. Flying at a low altitude presents additional risks, like obstacles such as unmarked power lines. The combination of time pressure, potential life-threatening situations, and challenging flight conditions may create a high-stress environment. Sometimes you believe that you are leaving for a life-threatening event, or a time-dependent patient, and you find out that it was not serious at all or, vice versa, you believe that you are leaving for a very easy health problem and you find yourself in a very difficult situation to manage from the medical point of view. Unpredictability, I would say, is the most important stress factor in search-and-rescue missions.
SAR missions are quite different from other kinds of missions: for example, in offshore missions, most times you know when you will leave, you know where you have to go, you know the weather conditions in advance, you have the weather forecast, and you already know how many people you have to carry. But stress factors change a lot according to the kind of operations you have to perform.
For example, in the civilian sector, aerial work is scheduled beforehand, so you already know where you have to go and what you have to do. But, in this case, customers could be a problem and a stress factor, because customers have the very bad habit of putting one pilot/ airborne operator in competition with the other: “The other pilot/ airborne operator was faster, the other pilot/ airborne operator was better”.
And these comments can create unhealthy competition. Younger pilots are more likely to suffer from this kind of pressure than older pilots and experienced pilots.
The best pilot is the pilot who is going to retire: it means that he or she survived throughout the years. Some pilots might think that the best pilot is the pilot who can do better and who is faster, who can perform the most challenging flights. This is not true. And this is a very toxic culture, and we need to change it. Luckily, these kinds of issues are already being tackled through crew resource management training programs that are compulsory for pilots.
And now we have also the Peer Support program, but only for commercial air transport operations. I think that in the future there will be some changes because EASA – the European agency – is more and more interested in the psychological aspects affecting safety. I think that they understood that the human mind is what makes the difference.
Can you elaborate on the concept of cognitive overload in aviation? How does it manifest in airborne operators, and what are its potential consequences?
🎤Cognitive overload is a critical concept in aviation psychology. It occurs when the amount of information that an person needs to process exceeds their working memory capacity. Working memory can only handle a limited amount of information at any given time – typically seven plus or minus two elements.
In aviation, particularly during critical phases like take-off and landing, pilots need to process a vast amount of information simultaneously. During take-off and landing, you must process a lot of information: you must check the data coming from the instruments on board, you must check the environment around you, etc. If someone is talking to you, their voice can distract you and this happens even if, for example, the person is not talking in your language and is not talking to you. This voice represents new information coming to your ear and it can “enter” your working memory. And if your working memory is already full, it’s just like a glass full of water: if you pour more water in it, the water inside the glass spills out. The same happens to our working memory if it’s already full. The risk is that we will lose the information we were processing.
That’s the reason why we are so nervous when someone is talking to us, when we are very concentrated and focused on something.
Cognitive overload is quite easy to achieve. When you are two people on board, if the crew are very good team players with a good leadership and so on and so forth, then having two people on board is a plus because you can share tasks and you can get help.
But if you do not get on very well and if you disagree, for example, with many aspects of the flight, then the risk is that the overload is even increasing with two people on board. As you can see, personality, communication style, empathy, topics that are not usually addressed in standard training, but they are so important for safety.
So what do you suggest for the training?
🎤I personally think that the key is self-awareness. I always say during my courses that to be a good professional, you need to work on yourself to be a better person. You cannot divide the human being from the professional role. The two things are strictly intertwined. You are a person. And in certain moments, you are a person performing a job. But you’re still a person. So, self-awareness. Self-awareness and self-critique. I’m sorry to say that, but it is mandatory to address awareness. Because if it’s always someone else’s fault, you cannot improve, you cannot evolve. And here we have another cognitive bias that is called fundamental attribution bias: when we make a mistake, we tend to attribute the responsibility of our mistake to someone else, to the external circumstances around us. But when we see someone else making a mistake, we tend to attribute the responsibility of their mistake to the person and not to external circumstances. And the explanation for this bias is physical: we cannot see ourselves from the outside; our eyes can only see the circumstances around us. So, we can only see the external circumstances causing our mistake.
When we look at other people, instead, we see what they are doing. Therefore, we tend to attribute their mistake to the person making it, because in this case we see the environment simply as a context. So, once again, human mind is the key.
How do you view the role of AI in addressing human aviation challenges? How do you think the integration of AI in mission operations might affect an operator’s sense of control and responsibility? Are there psychological implications to consider?
🎤I think there will be a very, very big and very fast development in the next few years. I think that it is very difficult to predict what the future holds in terms of AI and also virtual reality or augmented reality. But if I may say something based on my experience, for example, with automation, I think that AI could be a friend or a foe. It depends on the use we make of it. It is true that computers are much faster than humans and perhaps are more reliable, but they can fail anyway. And we need to maintain our skills, because in case technology fails, what can we do? We need to be trained for that. We need to know what to do without the aid of automation or in the future artificial intelligence or whatever. So, the suggestion would be to never forget to train our own skills. The human being must always supervise. My idea is that the machine is not replacing humans, but it’s changing human activity from a more practical one to more supervision. Boring or repetitive tasks can be done by the aid of the machine, but then the machine must be supervised too. But in the case of AI, machines are trained and can learn, therefore it is much more difficult to predict what may happen in the future.
And that’s the difference with the reality we have experienced so far. We can train artificial intelligence to learn. So perhaps we will reach a moment in which the output will be very close to perfection. But it will not be perfect. It means that, in that little gap, the human being could still make the difference. That’s my idea.
In search and rescue, there is a lot of human activity and I think it will be quite difficult to have it completely replaced by machines. Machines can help: AI can help in providing data, for example, or new information that can support the crew members. What I see is that young pilots are more likely to be open to technology since they started flying with many automated systems already in place, if compared with older pilots. These latter started flying with no automation at all and so it’s quite difficult for them to keep pace with technology.
So, we have two different problems with automation: some older pilots don’t really trust automated systems or they don’t like to use them when flying. Therefore, they have very highly performing machines, but they do not use all of the options they have. On the other hand, many younger pilots love technology. But in case of failure of the technology, some of them may not be used to fly manually (“children of magenta”). Again, we need to find a balance. It’s almost always a matter of balance and correct usage. The problem doesn’t lie in AI or technology or automation. The problem is in the human approach to technology and in the human-machine interaction.
I’m very happy to see that people and aviation industries are getting closer to the human aspects regarding safety because it’s almost 30, 40 years that research in the human factors field have become extensive and that we address human performance and human interaction. But I think that, so far, non-technical skills have not been paid the attention and consideration they deserve. Hink of the fact that we have defined something through the negation of something else, as if non-technical skills didn’t have an identity of their own. Therefore, since language reflects thought, it is very important to find a specific word for non-technical skills, as to make room in our minds for them, because also language can shape thought. And so, if we find the word, we find the space for them in our mind. And this is very, very important. And the first step is to start talking about that, to become aware. So, awareness again is the key word.
I hope I have given my little contribution; I hope that the people who will read this interview will be more aware about the importance of non-technical skills and the impact they have on safety. We need to keep the human being at the centre of the system – even in the future, when more technology will be available – because the risk is that we just leave technology working on its own while we lose our skills, instead of learning new ones and train them.
And we really need to be competent and professional also in the future.
Eleonora Avi is an aviation psychologist based in Trento and Verona, Italy. For the past 21 years, she has been actively engaged in the helicopter industry, occupying various roles. In 2017, she obtained the qualification as CRM (Crew Resource Management) Trainer and Aviation Psychologist. Last year, she embarked on a new endeavor by establishing her own freelance business. Eleonora is currently collaborating with the University of Verona in a PhD research programme focused on the topic of non-technical and emotional skills in the field of mountain rescue emergency operations.
