AVIATION PSYCHOLOGY: PILOT’S PERSONALITY TRAITS

          According to Ryckman (1982), personality is the sum of biologically based and learned behaviors that constitute the individual's unique responses to environmental stimuli. Personality plays a major role in determining how that individual will respond to environmental stimuli (Irani, 2008). Therefore, the personality traits of the pilots, who must be in constant interaction with the cockpit environment, and what they should be, is an important issue that needs to be emphasized.
          There are three important factors that determine the flight performance of pilots. These are: skills (capabilities), attitudes (behaviors that develop with attitudes) and personality factors (Chidester et al. 1991). Although many suggestions have been made on the skills that pilots should have in order to increase their performance, the attitudes and behaviors they should exhibit, the issue of what kind of personality traits should be in order to be a competent pilot is not given enough priority in pilot trainings. Based on this situation, Chidester et al. (1991), who made deep researches on pilot personality, identified two main dimensions that come to the fore in the personality structure of pilots. Instrumental traits related to achievement and goal seeking (obtaining achievement motivation) and expressive traits related to interpersonal behaviors, sensitivity and directness.
          According to these findings, it can be emphasized that pilots' high motivation towards a goal and success, as well as being warm and sensitive in their interpersonal relationships, are among the distinctive personality traits they should have. Shinar (1995), on the other hand, mentioned three personality traits that affect the success of pilots on the basis of needs. The first of these is the high achievement need of pilots. Pilots always want to achieve great success by doing their best. The second is their desire to push themselves and their need to face various difficulties in order to meet these wishes. Pilots want to achieve their success not in the easy way, but by tackling difficulties; The high success they achieve at the level they have difficulty in is more meaningful for them. Thirdly, they need to have a self-identity that will enable them to achieve this success in a positive way without experiencing any mismatch while fulfilling the challenging tasks and special demands of the piloting profession. Therefore, as Chidester et al. (1991) stated, Shinar (1995) also emphasized that competent pilots are success-oriented people, while achieving high success in challenging tasks, they also need to have expressive features by having a harmonious, warm and positive personality.
          On the other hand, Street and Helton (1993) revealed that many researchers agree that the five-factor model offers important findings for pilot selection and training research. Fitzgibbons, Davis, and Schutte (2004) applied the NEO P-R test to the pilots in order to measure the personality traits of the pilots according to the dimensions of the five-factor model. As a result of the measurement, 60% of the pilots had low neuroticism, 42% were highly extroverted and only 23% of them found that they were extroverted at a low rate.
          In addition, it was revealed that 27% of the pilots had a high openness to experience, 37% had a low level of experience, and 58% had a high level of responsibility. According to these results, it can be deduced that the pilots are generally emotionally balanced individuals, they are prone to extraversion and their level of responsibility is quite high. Similarly, in a personality study on military pilots, it was found that pilots with a high measurement score for their cognitive style (considering their spatial skills) had a low level of neuroticism (Glicksohn & Naor-Ziv, 2016). As a result of a study aiming to determine how female pilots differ from the personality traits of male pilots and non-pilot civilian women, using the NEO P-R personality inventory; It has been revealed that female pilots are more extroverted, assertive, thrill-seeking and expressing positive emotions than women in the general population. It has been determined that they have a high level of openness to experience; however, they tend to be hard-minded, proud, competitive and success-oriented. At the same time, it has been observed that they are more skilled in coping with stress and can remain calm in very difficult situations (Chappalle et al. 2010). In another study on female pilots, it was found that female pilots were less open to experience than male pilots were, but scored higher on extraversion, agreeableness, and responsibility measures (King, McGlohn, & Retzlqff, 1997). Considering all these findings, it is possible to say that pilots are generally emotionally balanced, competitive and success-oriented, responsible, extroverted and adaptable, open to experience.
          We know that the personality structures of pilots have an impact on their flight performance, with many studies agreeing on this issue. So, which personality traits of pilots in situations that cause various crises during flight affect their flight performance positively or negatively? Let's look for an answer to this question in the next aviation psychology article through an example of an accident in aviation.
Res. Assist. Zehra Nur Kurtoğlu
REFERENCES
Chappelle, W. L. et al. (2010). “NEO PI-R normative personality data that distinguish US Air Force female pilots”. Military Psychology, 22(2): 158-175.
Chidester, T. et al. (1991). Pilot personality and crew coordination: Implications for training and selection. The International Journal of Aviation Psychology, 1, 25-44.
Fitzgibbons, A., Davis, D and Schutte, P. C. (2004). Pilot Personality Profile Using the NEO-PI-R. NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia.
Glicksohn, J. and Naor-Ziv, R. (2016). “Personality profiling of pilots: traits and cognitive style”. International Journal of Personality Psychology, 2(1): 7-14.
Irani, F. (2008). The relationships among personality, stress, and situation awareness: The effect of situation awareness training. The Graduate Faculty of Auburn University.
King, R. E. McGlohn S. E. & Retzlqff, P. D. (1997). “Female United States Air Force pilot personality: the new right stuff”. Military Medicine, 162(10): 695-697.
Ryckman, R. (1982). Theories of personality (2nd ed.). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Shinar, Y. (1995). Personality as the key factor in the competence of a pilot. In R.S. Jensen (Ed.) Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Aviation Psychology, pp. 1137-1141. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University.
Street, D. and Helton, K. (1993). The ‘right stuff’: Personality tests and the five factor model in landing craft air cushion crew training. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 37th annual meeting, pp. 920-924.