Psychological skills of elite military pilots

Fifteen highly-rated pilots were interviewed at a Royal Canadian Air Force base by university psychology researchers as part of a larger longer project on how master performers differ from those of us that are merely ‘good’. Some of the results were published in 2014 — Examining the Psychological Skills Used by Elite Canadian Military Pilots — and it makes for interesting reading.

“Your focus narrows and you’re not thinking about other stuff. I can have outside stresses at home and it won’t affect me … as soon as I get into the plane I don’t think about it anymore until I’m on the ground.”

Participant 12

The research was conducted by a professor and a graduate student at the University of Ottawa, with the cooperation of Canada’s Department of National Defense (DND), and was designed to explore the psychological skills used by elite Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) pilots. Fifteen “high level performers” were selected by senior commanding officers at the 15 Wing Noose Jaw airbase to participate, and most had combat or deployment experience, or were highly rated instructor pilots. Over four days structured interviews were conducted, and the transcripts analyzed “inductively and deductively”. There were some great quotes from these master pilots:

“I visualize everything from what I see outside to controls in the cockpit. I even go over what ATC will say/ask and what I will verbalize to myself when I need to do checks in the cockpit.”

Participant 5

Most of the interviews aligned with the researcher’s other work on how humans achieve excellence, much of which is in line with the Inner Art of Airmanship mindsets. It’s stated that “fun and enjoyment seemed to strengthen the level of commitment felt by participants”. And the pilots described “a strong commitment to learning and preparing themselves for flight, wanting to know that if they failed it would not be for lack of preparation or effort”.

An excellent point about chair flying was made that “everybody says ‘chair flying’, but nobody really teaches anybody how to do it”. There’s a lot of other good stuff in the report that’s worth reading, with small sections on commitment, focus, mental readiness, mental imagery and stress management.

“If I know I’m not going to fly for a week I will always go back to the books that the students use, and I will re-read the books. Because, even though my day is predominantly running the school, never can I go to a cockpit and not be prepared.”

Participant 1

“[Do I] get into a groove and do it? Yeah; especially when you get very comfortable with it. The more time you have in the airplane, you know that feel of the aircraft – or muscle memory, brain memory or whatever it is – if something feels a little weird you’ll just go ‘okay something’s off here’ and you’ll be able to anticipate or change.”

Participant 8

However, it’s far from a perfect paper. There’s no control group, no quantitative measurements, and the analysis is unsurprisingly in broad agreement with cited papers written by the same lead author. But it’s cool to see mental strategies teased out by researchers, rather than just tales at the bar. And the points about chair flying and debriefs point to useful further study.

“Everybody [can learn] the hands and feet, but it’s the thinking part that’s the most important.”

Participant 15

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All quotes from Hohmann, M. & Orlick, T. (2014). Examining the psychological skills used by elite Canadian military pilots. Journal of Excellence, 16, 1.