Stress/Anxiety Driven Accidents

At 16:54 28 March 2018, Jim White wrote:
At 11:09 28 March 2018, wrote:
Mental and physical performance reduction does occur above a heart rat
of
=
@145 when that heart rate is stress induced. Equivalent or What doe
knowing that you have a high heart rate do to your stress levels?
Jim

Sympathetic arousal is a physiological response for all mammals.
Generally speaking, in humans the effects can begin at stress driven heart
rates above 145 bpm. It's onset is often insidious and the effects can be
catastrophically debilitating.

In my early years as a flight instructor, the almost universal (yet
questionable) reply from a student who I had just taken the controls from
would be to say "l was just going to do that". As I gained experience, I
gradually realized that most often I could comfortably allow things to
progress to the point where it should have been obvious to the student
that the recovery was well beyond their skill level. Interestingly you
would think that now their response would have been to openly admit
that "yes I was really screwed up there". However the almost universal
response now became "I thought I was okay". It never ceased to amaze
me how clueless they were at seeing the impending consequence in
caparison to their skill level.

I'm now retired from instructing, but knowing now what I didn't know then.
I will always wonder if their impaired perceptions were actually
attributable to the onset of sympathetic arousal. If I was still
instructing,
I would at least have the ability to know what their comparison heart rate
is.

My original intention was to write an article for soaring magazine.
My thanks to the serious replies on RAS. It show that at least some level
of awareness has been raised and that any future article would need to
reflect on that perspective.

Martin Eiler