‘As pilots we’re very focused on separating our behaviour from our emotions’

Andrew [pictured, left]: Shall we introduce ourselves first? My name is Andrew Forbes. I'm a captain with British Airways on the Airbus 320. And I'm here this evening to speak with Professor Rob Bor.

Rob [pictured, right]: Hi, Andrew. I'm a clinical psychologist by training and specialised in aviation psychology. I have a registration with the European Association for Aviation Psychology, and have also been a lead in the British Psychological Society in developing aviation psychology within the UK. I'm looking forward to the course which you and I are both teaching on, together with our neuropsychology colleague, Dr Alistair Gray.

Andrew: Thank you, Rob. Would you mind telling us how the course first came about?

Rob: This course started around four years ago before the pandemic. The impetus was a major event in 2015, when a Germanwings pilot deliberately crashed an aircraft into the French Alps. This was a watershed moment in aviation. The highly sensitive issue of pilot suicide was an unsettling matter especially for people directly affected by the crash, but also for everyone who travels by air. It shone a light on the mental wellbeing and personal lives of pilots, who we trust to deliver us safely to our destinations.

This event led to aviation regulators worldwide, and particularly the European Aviation Safety Authority, considering how to improve flight safety, with a view to focusing on pilots in particular, and also improving pilot wellbeing.

Until this point, there had been hardly any training or research in the area of pilot mental health and wellbeing. The British Psychological Society readily picked up on this issue and convened a specialist group who published a 2017 working paper on the psychological wellbeing of pilots.

We then recognised that there were no courses that related to the subject available to anyone, pretty much worldwide. The BPS had the foresight to consider an introductory short course for qualified practitioners, such as clinical, counselling, occupational, health, forensic psychologists, as well as our colleagues in psychological therapies, to introduce them to the unique and specific aspects of aviation psychology, particularly pertaining to flight safety, as it relates to crew wellbeing.

This two-day course has already been taught three times now under the auspices of the BPS, but was interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. During this time, the pandemic also put paid to most commercial flights… it seemed the need for this course had temporarily abated. With the resurgence of air travel post pandemic, everything is reversed. The issue of pilot wellbeing is now high on the on the agenda again. In fact, the greatest threat to flight safety at the moment is in terms of the wellbeing of air crew and the support that they're able to receive in role, and that is partly what this course introduces.

Andrew: Personally, I'm very happy that there are courses like this available for a psychologists. Are there other similar CPD courses that psychologists can take, or is this quite unique?

Rob: I think this one is pretty much unique. There are courses that medics can undertake. So the Civil Aviation Authority run specialist courses for medics who want to take advanced qualifications and specialisation in this topic. To the best of my knowledge, this is probably the only course worldwide related to mental health and wellbeing.

You will be aware, especially as a pilot, that psychology has played a very active role in flight safety, since its inception in the early 1900s. Human factors and human performance, issues to do with the sensitivities around air accident investigations, ergonomics, and importantly, selection of crew, including air traffic controllers, and engineers, has been core to aviation, since the First World War and obviously massively around the time of the Second World War and after then, when commercial aviation really got going.

But human factors and flight safety, whilst related, can be distinguished from the clinical aspects here, which is really to do with making sure that those people who are selected into flying have the right aptitude to do so. They have the necessary skills that can be developed, they're free of most of the severe mental health disorders that would prohibit them from having the medical certificate to fly, and also to monitor their mental health and wellbeing throughout their career. Believe it or not, pilots are human and may be challenged by the same problems as anyone else in the general population.

Andrew: So, you're saying there are three key areas where psychology can be of use in aviation: selection of pilots, looking after their welfare, and in the aftermath of accidents or incidents to help discover why that happened? Would those be the main three areas that you see psychology being of use?

Rob: Definitely, and I suppose the main emphasis is on human factors and flight safety. That is seen as a subject area all on its own, which could be anything from the more traditional areas of psychology, including perception, memory, human performance, and so on.

I'm curious Andrew, as an operating and very senior pilot, where do you come into contact with psychology, either day-to-day or in the context of your own training and career development?

Andrew: Psychology is becoming increasingly important in aviation. Aeroplanes have become so much more dependable, so much more reliable, the systems in which we work are, are so much more structured than before. When problems do happen, it's down to the human factor. What was the reason for the mistake? Is it the training, is it how the pilot is feeling, is it how the how the crew are interacting? As we go forwards, in order to maintain and improve the level of safety, the focus becomes more and more on the people engaged in the operation. As a pilot, we become a particular focus for that.

With respect to myself, I've been career pilot now for somewhere between the last 20 and 30 years. About 12 years ago, I found myself as a long haul pilot, with a good bit of time on my hands. I undertook an undergraduate degree in psychology with the Open University, which I finished about five years ago. And then we started our peer support programme within British Airways in the beginning of 2017, which is a confidential programme for pilots where they can speak to another pilot like myself. We're not psychologists by any means, but we do use an awful lot of the skills that counsellors would use. We don't give pilots advice: we use a person-centred approach to try to walk in the shoes of the person who's contacted us and to fully understand their problem. Sometimes we do some signposting. But generally, they already have the answers in their head, but they're almost looking for a colleague to bounce those ideas off. And that's where we can be really useful. We spend 80 to 90 per cent of our time just listening. That's the really helpful thing for people.

This September, I start a Doctorate in Counselling Psychology, which is an area that I have a particular interest in, and something that I hope to move into once my career in aviation winds down. Airline pilots have to have to retire once they hit their 65th birthday.

Rob: Fascinating. I guess many people who will be engaging with what we're sharing here would be unaware that pilots may have a dual career, or pick up other interests in their lifetime as an operating pilot. That a pilot could acquire psychology skills, and then subsequently a psychologist registration, certainly is testament to your motivation. Maybe one day we'll have a discussion about some of the similarities and differences between being a pilot and a practising and registered psychologist.

For those joining the course, what could be some of the benefits be, of meeting a pilot such as yourself? What are they likely to learn and take away from that, as opposed to just meeting with a psychologist?

Andrew: Well, something I've discovered over the past 10 years or so, is psychologists and pilots tend to think in different ways. Pilots think very much in black and white, there's a right way or a wrong way of doing things. If you're to get 20 senior pilots together and decide what procedure we're going to use, they will come to a consensus and everybody will agree… whereas with psychologists, you can have experts disagreeing all the time, and psychologists are much more comfortable working in a grey area.

Trying to make those two schools of thought come together in a meaningful way is really important, because pilots can be a little bit dubious about psychologists. Psychologists think psychologically, not necessarily logically, and that is often quite a scary area for a pilot, especially if they're dealing with their own mental health. They may think if they were to divulge something, some extrapolation could be made about them that's unwarranted. So I'd like to help psychologists understand the fear pilots having in disclosing mental health issues, and the difficulty that they that they sometimes encounter in even searching their own emotions. In aviation as pilots we're very focused on separating our behaviour from our emotions. If something negative is to happen in the flight deck, or some mistake is made, or if we're worried about the weather or a failure that's occurred on the aircraft, we're trained very intensively to put that fear and that emotion into a little box somewhere in the back of our brains. We get quite good at doing that, not just in aviation… we transfer that to our personal lives, so we can become very separated from our emotions. In other words, we sometimes don't even know properly how we feel about things. If I could be of some use in helping people understand that, maybe that could be of value.

Rob: I can see that at times it could be very necessary to be able to compartmentalise feelings, and not to have certain feelings right at the forefront.

What would be the single biggest message that you would want somebody attending the course to take away?

Andrew: Just being cautious is quite important as a psychologist dealing with pilots. If they think they have found the right person, they will be quite good at following advice. We're very good at learning procedures and executing them. But frequently, we're not quick to disclose everything.

If you do encounter a pilot that that has stress, depression, anxiety or relationship problems, whatever, take what they say initially as though that's their opening gambit to see if they trust you. Just keep asking questions, because there's an awful lot the pilots are quite good at not disclosing… they've done that their whole careers. They may feel, 'if I had disclosed everything, maybe I wouldn't be where I am today'. So I think caution is the main word that I would advocate.

Rob: That's very sanguine, and insightful, coming from you as an operating pilot. Thank you for sharing that.

From my perspective, as a practising psychologist working in aviation, I think the most important thing for people to take away would be that here is a sub-specialism within psychology, which is defined by the people who participate in it. But the lessons, insights and things that we are researching in this area apply to many other work domains and safety critical jobs. These could be in oil and gas, shipping, the military, and in financial services, as well as many others as well. Although we focus extensively on air crew, particularly pilots, the lessons learned can be generalised to other groups as well.

A further thing that I would probably emphasise is a degree of caution and humility. It is, after all, a short course and we have in mind to develop a whole postgraduate degree course in this area. And we must remember as psychologists that people's livelihoods and safety are at stake. We should always practice to the highest standards that we know and are taught in psychology, and be aware of our limitations. For many of us, it's a new and evolving area and the limitations perhaps are greater than the sound knowledge base that we already have. But by more people joining the cause, hopefully we can expand our knowledge base, improve our confidence in working in this area and keep more pilots flying with a more positive experience of psychology, mental health and mental wellbeing services.

Andrew: I absolutely agree. To enlarge the knowledge base that psychologists have about aviators is one thing, but also by doing that, we can hopefully increase the trust that pilots have in the profession of psychology. Ultimately, that will only help both groups.

- The workshop will be held at the British Psychological Society's London Office on 20-21 June. Find out more, and book now.