What is stressful about flying jobs?

When people hear that I have been studying stress in the lives of people who fly for a living, they often ask, "So what is the most stressful thing about flying jobs?"

If they want to hear something specific, I have to begin my reply with "It depends..." It depends on whether the question refers to pilots or cabin crew. It depends on whether they work in corporate aviation, for a cargo carrier, or for a passenger airline -- and then it depends on which kind of airline: regional, mainline domestic, or international.

What is stressful about a flying job also can depend on whether an individual is senior or junior in the company, whether they commute, what kinds of trips they do and what kinds of routes they fly. For scheduled airline people, being on reserve is stressful. For people working for on-demand carriers, being on call is stressful. What is stressful can depend on the time of year, or even the time of day.

The specifics of what is stressful vary a lot. However, if I am asked to answer the question in a more general way -- if I had to sum up what is stressful in a single word -- I would say that what is most stressful is uncertainty. The day-to-day realities of flying jobs are full of uncertainties major and minor, and that is stressful.

I must admit that what my research eventually showed to be most stressful about flying jobs was not what I thought I was going to find when I began to design my study. At the outset I was quite focused on trying to learn what events in a normal duty day were stressful.

I interviewed pilots and flight attendants, asking them to describes things that happened aboard the aircraft that were stressful. They complied with my request, and I was able to come up with a list of 'event stressors' to include in the Aircrew Stress Study survey. The participants then rated how stressful each of those items would be for them.

Fortunately, I also asked those I interviewed to tell me about other things that were stressful to them, aside from things that happened aboard the plane. It turns out that there were a lot of other stressful things that people wanted to talk about. Not all of them were directly related to flying, per se. In fact, what happened aboard the aircraft often was the least stressful part of their lives.

I was told again and again that flying actually was '"the easy part," or "the fun part" of their lives. What was most stressful were worries about money and job stability. Would they be furloughed? Would they have to take another cut in pay and benefits? Would they have enough money for retirement? Those kinds of worries topped the list for so many of the people I listened to.

I also heard a lot about the stressfulness of combining a flying career with family life. In fact, even those who were single and unattached talked about how their flying jobs frequently made things difficult in their personal lives. Irregular schedules and frequent absences from home can wreak havoc with personal relationships and social lives.

Another big source of stress: rules and procedures that seemed to be constantly changing, especially those related to security measures, work rules and labor contracts. In fact, very little about civilian flying jobs is unambiguous, except, perhaps, the SOPs -- and even those are constantly amended. Schedules constantly change. So do destinations, loads, flying conditions -- and crews.

Some sectors of the aviation industry experience these things more acutely than others, but no one is completely spared. In sum, it seems that the common thread through all of the things that people who fly perceive as 'stressful' is uncertainty.

Next, we'll begin look at the specifics of what the people who answered the Aircrew Stress Study survey found stressful.

** Copyright © 2007 by Bobbie Sullivan. All rights reserved. **