Introduction to Aviation Psychology

Aviation psychology, by revealing the essence of the laws governing the functioning of the psyche and the specific ways they manifest in the aviation domain, is meant to broadly adapt aviation specialists to the realities of aviation. Adaptation is needed both by those who have only just chosen the path of an aviation specialist and by those with extensive experience in operator activity. As practice shows, extensive personal experience can protect against only a portion of dangerous phenomena; protection against the greater part of them requires combining one’s own experience with everything that has been learned over decades of studying aviation accident causation. Young people who have decided to devote themselves to aviation need adaptation first and foremost – adaptation to a new environment where much is unknown. The formation of any person begins from the day of their birth – it is from that day that the conditioned-reflex part of the psyche begins to take shape – the core of its content, on which practically everything else will depend. Anyone setting out to master a new environment must be prepared for change – for the formation of new conditioned reflexes – the only way to become adapted to the environment. Influence on the psyche that would always guarantee the desired result is unthinkable without an understanding of the conditioned-reflex nature of the psyche. The psyche is woven from an enormous number of conditioned reflexes that, over the course of a person’s entire life, form a gigantic network – an information system that is by its nature an extremely precise system – subject to those cause-and-effect relationships that are laid down in the process of learning about the surrounding world.

Indeed, the psyche is a precise system, but its precision must be understood as meaning that the system responds with one signal (reaction) or another only in accordance with the algorithms of action and cause-and-effect relationships recorded within it (the psyche responds with one reaction or another in accordance with information recorded over the course of life in the form of conditioned reflexes). The cause-and-effect relationships assimilated (recorded, internalized) by the brain can be true (actually present in the world) or false, distorted due to errors made by the person themselves in learning these relationships, or due to errors made when explaining these relationships to the person by someone else. True cause-and-effect relationships have the character of laws, regularities, and rules, by following which one can manage oneself and others, whereas false cause-and-effect relationships, generated by one cognitive error or another, lead to failure – and failure, being by its nature a consequence, can be separated from its cause by various intervals of time: when some regularities are violated, the consequence manifests immediately, while when others are violated, the consequence is realized only years after the cause first appeared. The effectiveness of an organism’s adaptation to its environment will thus be determined by how many cause-and-effect relationships between units of information in the environment have been learned, and by how closely these learned and assimilated cause-and-effect relationships correspond to those actually present in the world.

Alongside the aforementioned extreme precision of the psyche, it is also dynamic – conditioned reflexes are rewritten every second – and all the more rapidly the more dramatically the environment around a person changes, since the formation of new conditioned connections serves to adapt to changing environmental conditions, conditions that are, moreover, probabilistically organized, which is why one of the tasks of the psyche is to gauge the probability of one event or another occurring. The dynamism of the psyche grants us the ability to adapt as quickly as possible to a continuously changing environment, but it also conceals a danger, namely the formation not of normal (adaptation-promoting) but of pathological conditioned reflexes (neuroses), which disrupt adaptation – distorting practically all mental functions. In this connection it seems extremely important to note the following. For someone who has set out on the path of mastering an aviation specialty (first and foremost a pilot or air traffic controller) and who wishes a better fate for themselves, there is no other way to walk this path than constant self-improvement, since any error can become the cause of an aviation event, after which – understanding their direct relation to it and the impossibility of restoring the life and health of those who suffered – the person will be broken, and life after that moment will be divided into two completely different periods in terms of worldview – «before» and «after» the aviation event. If everyone understood this regularity and became imbued with an unprecedented sense of responsibility toward themselves and others, the greater part of aviation events could be avoided.

Unfortunately, one must acknowledge that year after year the same mistakes are made, a list of which has long been known, which testifies to the fact that aviation specialists lack the information needed not only to draw a life-saving conclusion but also to resolve to put that conclusion into practice. Thus, aviation is that sphere where the boundless capacity of the psyche for adaptation and for perfecting intelligence – which plays a decisive role in survival and in the success of aviation specialists and is based on an understanding of the cause-and-effect relationships between phenomena of reality – is combined with equally dramatic changes in the psyche following exposure to psychological trauma (the blocking of needs), which in a number of cases destroy previously existing conditioned reflexes so thoroughly that the person permanently loses the ability to recover their health. Aviation psychology is concerned both with questions related to ensuring maximum adaptation of aviation specialists to the dangerous aviation environment and with questions of restoring and treating mental pathology that has arisen in aviation specialists in everyday life and at work.

Aviation psychology is primarily an applied science, whose main goal is to reduce the share of aviation accidents associated with the human factor. In essence, aviation psychology is the science of the psychophysiological hazardous factors of flight and of counteracting them. The number of aviation events associated with the human factor remains consistently high, and this despite the introduction of modern objective-control equipment and the automation of aircraft control processes. The problem is that the introduction of new information technologies eliminates some errors, has no effect at all on others, and gives rise to new ones. Thus, the spectrum of errors made by flight and dispatch personnel is constantly changing, and therefore the system of measures aimed at their prevention cannot remain static. In this connection, a solution to this problem is possible both through minimizing already known («old») errors and through anticipating new ones associated with the introduction of information technologies. At the same time, the share of «old» errors is significantly higher than that of new ones – aviation specialists again and again, ignoring their colleagues’ years of experience and what is already known about the human factor, create the conditions for aviation events to occur.

What, then, hinders the fight against manifestations of the human factor? A true understanding of the hazardous factors of flight is impeded by improperly prepared reports of accident investigation commissions – commission staff often merely indicate the fact that a given provision of a regulatory document was (or was not) complied with – instead of indicating the reason why the designated incorrect action took place. In essence, an investigation commission’s report amounts to nothing more than a rewriting of regulatory documents, indicating what was and was not done. But regulatory documents (the Flight Operations Manual, the Flight Manual, the Federal Aviation Regulations) are already known to everyone; what aviation specialists need is different information – information about the causes of erroneous actions, not a mere listing of them. Moreover, the participants in aviation events themselves, seeking to avoid additional problems, are reluctant to report in full what actually happened to them during dangerous situations, thereby depriving their colleagues of exceptionally important information – information on which the prevention of similar events in the future will largely depend. And this happens not with just one aviation specialist, which ultimately produces a cycle, a circulation of false and distorted information within aviation. Thus, when reading an investigation commission’s report, we by no means always have the opportunity to understand the reasons behind the actions of those involved in an aviation accident. Concealing or outright distorting what actually took place during an aviation event is unacceptable and carries a very high cost.

Therefore the only path capable of substantially raising the level of flight safety is impartiality and a high degree of responsibility on the part of those engaged in investigating aviation accidents, combined with providing open access to all the documents that the investigation commission deals with – first and foremost, open access to the recordings of communications of all aviation specialists who had any relation to the event. The next problem on the path to preventing aviation events associated with the human factor is the sometimes-lacking proper mindset among aviation specialists for absorbing information about the hazardous factors of flight.

The mindset of aviation specialists toward mastering the fundamentals of the human factor is extremely important. The problem outlined here will not be solved until every aviation specialist realizes that it is precisely the disregard of a whole range of physiological and mental laws that leads to errors, and that the perception of aviation accidents as something fatal, inevitable, is nothing more than a defense mechanism of the psyche – a convenient way of refusing to counteract the psychophysiological factors of flight. Therefore, in order to avoid such errors, one must know the main psychophysiological hazardous factors of flight and the mechanisms of how the organism functions, and must constantly work on oneself. Another serious obstacle on the path to preventing aviation events associated with the human factor is the conscious (!) violation of the requirements of regulatory documents. Conscious violations of work procedure are the cause of roughly half of all aviation events associated with the human factor, and this fact convincingly shows that in the psyche of those who commit violations there are clearly more arguments in favor of the safety of violations: these include the «norms» of violation that have taken shape at one aviation enterprise or another, the larger number of flights involving violations that ended safely, problems with probabilistic forecasting, the low probability of being punished for violations, and one benefit or another derived from the violation.

This lecture course has been developed for teaching the discipline «Aviation Psychology,» which in recent times may go by other names – «Human Capabilities and Limitations in Flight Activity,» «Training of Aviation Personnel in the Field of the Human Factor,» «Special Training in the Field of the Human Factor.» In reality, however, it is one and the same discipline – «Aviation Psychology» – and all the others are either its exact equivalent or contain within them only part of its topics. Alongside preparing cadets, the lectures are also intended to prepare active aircraft crews and air traffic management personnel, and accordingly the material of the textbook also covers the programs of disciplines taught at aviation training centers aimed at preparing aviation specialists in the field of the human factor (including CRM – crew resource management).