Airlines are not the whole picture!
As soon as I launched the Aircrew Stress Study, I began to receive a lot of feedback about it from participants -- and I mean information well beyond the questions on the survey. People commented on the survey questionnaire and the topics it covered, but they also volunteered all kinds of things about their jobs and their lives that I hadn't asked about.
Some of this feedback came to me via the last page of the survey questionnaire itself, where I had put an open text box and invited participants to use it to say anything at all they wished. A lot more information came to me as email, or as comments on the forums where I had put invitations to participate in the survey.
I paid attention to all of it, and I was touched by how forthcoming and enthusiastic people were about my study. As a researcher, I felt I had struck gold!
When I designed the survey, it was aimed at people who flew for airlines. One of the first things I learned -- and very quickly -- was that 'flying for a living' is not necessarily synonymous with working for an airline.
I began to hear from people who worked in other sectors of aviation, many of whom pointed out that, while the survey was interesting, the job-specific parts didn't really address the kinds of flying they did. I heard from corporate crews, bush pilots, freight pilots, med-evac crews, air tour pilots, and flight school instructors, among others. They all suggested (or at least hinted) that I should re-design the survey -- or create a new one -- with specific questions to suit their kind of flying.
I came to realize that there were whole worlds of flying about which I knew next to nothing. So, I started my interviewing process all over again, in order to learn about flying outside of the airlines.
Repeating the process I used to develop the questionnaire for airline crews, I spoke to and corresponded with pilots and cabin crew who worked in many sectors of the civilian air transport industry besides the scheduled airlines. I asked a lot of questions on aviation message boards to fill in some of the blanks. I then tinkered with the original survey questionnaire a bit to include questions for the pilots who flew scheduled freight, and I designed a whole new questionnaire for the corporate crews and others who flew under General Aviation rules.
Along the way I began to get the feeling that this was not going to be a quick little research project. The more I learned, the more I realized I had a long way to go to understand what flying for a living was all about.
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