Fifteen highly-rated pilots were interviewed at a Royal Canadian Air Force base by university psychology researchers as part of a larger longer project on how master performers differ from those of us that are merely ‘good’. Some of the results were published in 2014 — Examining the Psychological Skills Used by Elite Canadian Military Pilots — and it makes for interesting …
Tag: research
Academic Airmanship Paper
This week I read an interesting research article on airmanship in standardized airline cockpits. The lead author is Torgeir Haavik, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology with an engineering background in oil drilling, who more recently earned a PhD in the sociology of risk and safety. The paper is wildly — for an academic journal — titled: ‘Johnny …
New Research on Meditating F-16 Fighter Pilots
New peer-reviewed scientific research suggests mindfulness mental training helps F-16 fighter pilots. It’s in the latest edition of the International Journal of Aviation Psychology, and describes a long-term (2-year) study using Norwegian F-16 pilots. These high-performance combat-rated pilots show a increase in self-perceived skills associated with mindfulness, attention regulation and arousal regulation following a regime of mindfulness training. Alone it’s not …