Sickness and Stress in Operational Flying

Abstract

To the medical branch of an air force, the social or environmental conditions of pressing importance are the psychological stresses inevitable in air warfare. Only in war is it possible to observe the effects of such factors as acute hazard and intensive operational effort, with their resultant anxiety and fatigue, on the performance and well-being of such a highly selected population as the air crews of the Royal Air Force. Both the immediate effects of these stresses on efficiency and the long-term results in health were, therefore, the urgent concern of those whose duty it was to minimize these effects by every means open to the medical branch of a combatant force. The central issue was one of limitation of spells of duty?either short term, where the effects of hours of prolonged attention were to be forestalled, or long term, where the limits of an operational tour had to be set at a level high enough to ensure an adequate operational return for the training investment made yet not so long as to endanger health and morale. The problems of peacetime practice in social and industrial medicine are hardly as dramatic,, yet the essential mechanism of the adjustment of men to the less hazardous but frequently harassing conditions of post-war life are identical. This account of some typical studies of sickness in relation to measurable environmental and personal factors is given in the hope oT displaying the potentialities of the methods used in the study of problems of sickness and morale in an industrial population. Research on duty limitation in the R.A.F. during the war had a tripartite approach by clinical, laboratory, and field surveys. The clinical studies have been described by Symonds (1943), the laboratory work by Russell Davis (1948); in the present paper is set out an application of statistical methods to data collected in the course of active operations in the field.