The Life Style Keys to Flight Deck Performance of the Naval Aviator - Another Window

This paper presents the views of a Naval Flight Surgeon on the coping mechanisms that the Naval Aviator brings to his occupation. It develops the theme that four life style characteristics necessarily receive inordinate polishing, and that the aviator's continued safety is dependent on his ability to fully exploit all four of these in concert. When one of the four is flawed, he is in jeopardy. Also identified in the paper are five built-in defects present in the healthy aviator that require that he be protected from these, both by his own recurring awareness and by concerted institutional measures. Implicit in the complexity of modern military aircraft is that they are designed for the aviator whose described characteristics are forever uncompromised. The engineer is wrong who believes that the capabilities of the aviator who will fly his creation are static, or that these capabilities are always tweaked to the maximum.