Transcriber: Nika Kotnik Reviewer: Mile Živković
How many of you have taken a flight recently?
Or are maybe planning to take one?
Maybe with a show of hands?
Yeah, I was expecting a lot of you.
When you're flying, do you ever think about the people sitting in the front?
Not the first-class passengers, I know you think about those.
I mean the pilots.
Does it ever cross your mind, whether or not
your pilots are mentally prepared
to handle any challenge that comes their way?
Maybe like this pilot.
I live and breathe aviation every day.
My dad is a pilot and an examiner on Boeing 777.
My twin brother is a pilot.
All my uncles are pilots and so are my grandparents.
My grandmother too.
My mom, she was a beautiful stewardess, so you can guess the story.
My parents met up in the air, and then I was born.
With aviation in my genes.
And I can tell you this - pilots are under a lot of stress.
They have to endure this high-risk, unpredictable environment at work
every single day.
Constantly surrounded with challenges - one of them being time pressure.
Having to take off on time, and land on time...
Bad weather conditions cause chaos and delays.
There might be low visibility or a busy airspace
and a pilot is unable to land,
potentially running out of fuel after a sixteen-hour flight.
How about jet lag? We all know how tough that one is.
It takes us days to recover.
Pilots sometimes get only 48 hours.
They need to find a way of how to get in enough sleep
and rest and to prepare for their next flight.
These are commonly occuring challenges that undoubtedly cause
high mental and physical stress.
The amount of responsibility pilots have is enormous.
Picture yourself going to work and being responsible for a few hundred lives.
Making sure they arrive to their destination safely.
Not only that, if you cause physical harm to the aircraft,
you become subject to investigation.
You might be responsible for a few hundred million dollars
of financial damage to the airline company.
It's definitely not easy being a pilot. There is no room for mistakes.
On top of all of that, pilots like all of us have to handle
the everyday stress and challenges that we all go through.
Marriage problems, naughty kids, teenage kids, old parents,
bills to pay, financial problems, health problems.
Right?
They need to know how to manage stress
and be mentally sharp at all time during their duty.
But are they really?
It appears that 80% of air crashes happen due to human error.
This means that when something unexpected and startling happens within a cockpit
pilots are unable to execute their skills and knowledge
because of high psychological stress.
And we've all been there, we've been in situations
where you have to perform under pressure.
And what happens?
Sometimes you freeze or choke, right,
your mind blocks, you can't think, you can't remember,
you might not know where you are.
Imagine the same thing happening to pilots 11,000 meters in the air.
Or during take-off or landing.
These men and women don't have time to choke or freeze.
Their minds need to be fully functioning for optimal decision making, planning,
anticipating, problem solving.
The list goes on.
But what could happen if a pilot's mind does block?
A clear example of stress leading to poor performance
is a story of two pilots who were about to take off,
without turning on one of the engines.
Why?
Not only were they under immense time pressure,
the captain was going through a divorce,
the first officer's brother nearly died that morning.
Luckily, take off was rejected, they stayed on land and had time to recover.
But a less fortunate example happened in Taiwan not that long ago.
When the plane took off, pilots were faced with an engine failure,
very well rehearsed procedure, pilots know they have to switch off the failed engine
and land with the one they have left.
To a clear mind this seems completely obvious,
but because the event was so startling and shocking to the pilots,
it completely impaired their judgement and clouded their minds.
And you know what happened?
In that state of panic, they switched off the wrong engine.
The only working engine that was keeping them up in the air.
And the plane crashed seconds after.
These are just two examples, I could definitely go on,
but I feel like I scared you a little, so I'd rather not.
We all talk about faster, more fuel efficient airplanes,
technological advances.
Look how far we've come since 1903, from the first flight to this day.
But nobody ever mentions the well-being of pilots,
and their mental readiness to stay resilient in the time of stress.
But I do.
Not only because I come from a family of aviators,
I won an silver olympic medal,
I graduated from Berkley with a degree in psychology
and I'm now finishing my master's in performance psychology.
And I really understand what it takes to perform under pressure.
It is that mental readiness.
And I kept wondering why don't pilots have any type of mental training
that would allow them to have those skils
and cope with stress once it comes their way?
So I have a solution. I put together a program called avioPREP.
"Avio" stands for aviation, and "prep" stands for preparation.
Or as the acronym tells us, its a pilot resilience enhancing program.
So what is it exactly?
It's a four-week mental training course specifically designed for airline pilots,
that really educates and prepares them
on how to manage stress in their high hrisk environment.
So what does it include?
It's composed of mindfullness training and performance psychology,
and I'll break these down for you.
Mindfullnes training is the training of awareness.
For you really to learn how to pay attention to your thoughts,
your breathing, your body, your surrounding environment.
The most recent research in neurosciene,
a lab that I was actually fortunate to work in San Diego,
suggests that the more aware you are,
the more resilient you are to stress.
So let me give you an example.
You're a pilot, getting ready for a simulator exam, what happens?
Doubts, negative thoughts, anxiety, fear, they all rush in.
Nothing unusual prior to performance. We all get scared.
Now, if you are aware,
if you pay attention to your negative thoughts and that racing heartbeat,
you're more likely to recognize the situation and say,
"It's OK, I'm nervous. It's normal. But I'll be fine."
As soon as you do that, it tones down the stress level,
you have that mental clarity, you stay focused and calm.
But if you're not aware, your brain can't tell the difference
why this might be happening.
Are you having a panicky mind because a lion is attacking you?
Or because you're in a simulator exam?
There's really no difference.
And most likely, your brain thinks: "A lion is attacking me, I have to run."
In that case your mind blocks,
and within a performance environment, you choke and underperform.
The whole idea of training mindfullness is really for you to take control
over the stress response, instead of stress taking control of you.
And mindfullness training has been widely implemented
in various performance contexts and extensively researched.
One of them being in the US military.
Navy seals and marines practice mindfullness prior to deployment,
so they have those mental skils of how to overcome the stressors
and challenges in their high-risk environment.
Combat pilots, professional athletes, they all train mindfulness.
That awareness of how to stay in the moment calm and focused
to perform optimally.
The other part of the program includes aspects of performance psychology,
which will teach pilots those additional mental skils
and tools of how to overcome performance stress.
And here I'm specifically talking about simulator exams.
Did you know pilots have to prove their capabilities every 6 months?
Every six months they have to prove they're worthy of flying
and maintaining their licence.
Picture yourself having an exam at work every half a year,
and your job depending on it.
All the way to retierment.
Very stressful.
So a combination of mindfulness training and performance psychology
will equip pilots with a mental toolbox
so that they can use it whenever the challenges come their way.
Now, a mental training system or program as such
does not yet exist in aviation.
When pilots are struggling with performance,
all that is avaliable is that they're sent to additional simulator training,
to practice their technical skills over and over and over again.
But as a three time Olympian and a lifelong athlete,
I know this isn't enough.
I can practice all day long and break world records in training sessions.
But when it comes to my time to perform and race under pressure,
what plays a decisive factor?
It's my mental game
that's going to eventually decide whether or not I'll make it happen.
And the beauty of it all is that the more you train your brain,
the more it rewires itself in a way
so that when you experience stressors and challenges in the future,
it kind of automatically triggers a more resilient response to stress.
And that's what I want for pilots.
I want pilots to train their brains that when something unexpected happens
within their performance context, they'll be ready to react.
But, like with physical fitness,
we have to invest time and energy into mental fitness.
So, how will pilots get this training?
The program will initially start off as a consulting office,
and then expand to an online platform,
where every single pilot will gain access to the program.
Believe it or not, in the next 20 years,
only Boeing Aircraft will need half a million new pilots,
meaning that 2,000 pilots will be in training every single month.
Not to mention how many other pilots will be needed to fly other types of aircrafts.
And I can assure you this: every single pilot will know how to fly.
They'll have the best type of technical training.
But my question is this: how are we making sure that these pilots
are also mentally prepared to handle the stressors that come about
in their life long careers, especially the future generation pilots,
which will be even more so automation dependant?
Nobody has thought of that yet.
But it's on my mind all the time.
Because I know from my personal experience that the only way to ensure
optimal performance is to train both mental skills and technical skills.
This program should be implemented into pilots training,
as early as possible along with the technical skill training
so they have those tools ahead of time.
My vision is this:
avioPREP, in opinion,
I would love it to become a regulatory requirement,
meaning that every single pilot
will have to go through the program in order to get a his or her licence.
Why?
Because when looking at the bigger picture,
the purpose of the program is to contribute to airline safety.
By training pilots to be more mentally resilient,
we're minimizing the human error,
the 80% that I was talking about earlier on,
and the potential of such accidents happening.
But aviation safety is not just some abstract idea to me.
It means so much more than that.
It means that my brother and my dad are going to come home every day.
So, put yourself back on that flight,
that you just took or maybe you are about to take:
how would you feel knowing that your pilots are mentally prepared
to handle any challenge that comes their way?
Pretty safe, right?
(Slovenian) Thank you.
(Applause)