Simulator Anxiety: Is the answer “Pull Yourself Together” or Collaboration?
A recent LinkedIn post from Aviation Psychologist Paul Dickens caught my attention. He has been analysing responses from 293 commercial pilots for a forthcoming presentation on simulator anxiety. All 293 reported experiencing it. He's presenting his findings at the EAAP this month and I hope follows through with a subsequent paper.
As both an airline pilot and psychologist, his findings don't particularly surprise me. What interests me more is what we do with that information.
Much of the conversation around simulator anxiety understandably focuses on the pilot: preparation, coping strategies, breathing, reframing anxious thoughts, managing sleep and building confidence. All potentially useful. But that framing risks locating the whole problem — and therefore the whole solution — within the person being assessed.
A simulator session doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It takes place within the context of multiple systems: the airline, the training team, the personal lives of everyone involved. For a brief period of time, those complex systems interact and, while the (generally achieved) aim is a positive experience supporting improved performance, it can't be a surprise that anxiety is frequently present. "I've ignored the family for weeks preparing for this - it had better go well" or "at least I've got a job for another six months" are comments I often hear from colleagues around the time of their recurrent checks. The pressure is real, but Paul's post clearly demonstrates that it's almost impossible for the individual pilot to be the complete solution to simulator anxiety.
On a non-training day out on the line, we operate as a crew and while the captain has the greatest ability to influence the psychological environment of the day, everyone contributes. From introductions in the crew room to briefing styles, general conversation and adherence to standard procedures, the smallest aspects of the psychological environment play a significant part in determining the extent to which each member of the crew performs at their very best.
To most pilots, the power gradient steepens when we enter the simulator with the trainer firmly established as almost completely controlling the psychological environment.
That influence begins long before the trainees enter the simulator. Many pilots talk about a cycle of relief as they walk out of a recurrent check with building anxiety towards the next check: noticing when it's due, submitting bids for particular days and times, scanning rosters for fellow trainee and trainer details. The way a trainer introduces themselves, conducts the briefing, responds to an early mistake or manages interactions between trainees can all influence the psychological environment in which the rest of the session takes place. Trainers, of course, arrive with their own pressures, experiences and individual styles, and creating that environment is unlikely ever to be entirely conscious. Perhaps this is where there is an opportunity to think differently about simulator anxiety: not by asking trainers to remove pressure, but by helping everyone involved understand how the environment they collectively create can either add to or reduce pressure that is already there.
Simulator training necessarily involves challenge, and assessment necessarily involves scrutiny. But there may be an important distinction between the pressure inherent in demonstrating competence and anxiety inadvertently generated by the environment in which we ask pilots to demonstrate it.
If the purpose of assessment is to establish what somebody can actually do, there is an argument for understanding which aspects of stress provide useful challenge and which simply interfere with performance.
Perhaps simulator anxiety therefore belongs not only in conversations about pilot wellbeing, but in instructor training too.
And perhaps managing it is not solely the responsibility of the anxious pilot. It may be something that trainee, trainer and training system need to understand — and manage — together.