Effects of Stress on Performance during Highly Demanding Tasks in Student Pilots

ABSTRACT Objective To study how stress affects the performance of student pilots under highly demanding conditions, during flight simulator sessions. Background Pilots usually suffer stress under highly demanding conditions. This can affect performance to such an extent that the human factor is the main cause of aviation accidents. Stress has not been studied recently in student pilots. Method We used a wristband to record in real-time the Electrodermal Activity (EDA, a reliable indicator of stress) of student pilots during several flight simulator sessions. Experienced flight instructors graded their performance during these flights. The sessions were split into different tasks to focus only on performance and EDA in Highly Demanding Tasks (HDTs). Results We found that students have higher EDA when correctly performing an HDT. Furthermore, we observed low EDA in students who perform well on the session as a whole but perform poorly on one particular HDT. Conclusion The study indicates that high levels of stress are related to high performance at high levels of demand. We also observe that students (although they may perform well on the session as a whole) poorly performed a highly demanding task, during which they showed low levels of stress. We suggest that this could be due to fatigue, a lack of motivation, level of skills, or even overconfidence, all of which are variables that should be assessed in future work.