6 minute read
Focus: Build Your Foundation Mental Resilience and Decision-Making in High-Stress Environments
By LT Garrett Hendrickson, USCG
It was a balmy Florida evening on March 13, 2022 at Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater when the SAR alarm went off. My crew and I just finished dinner and hurried to muster at the Operations Center to get details about the case. A seven-year-old girl was experiencing acute appendicitis on a cruise ship 330 nautical miles deep into the Gulf of Mexico. The Duty Flight Surgeon said she needed to be at a hospital in four hours or she might not make it. The quickest my crew could possibly do it was five hours.
The rest of this story is filled with challenges familiar to most Naval Aviators: balancing safety and efficiency in a race against the clock, mitigating numerous risks to accomplish a high-gain mission, and a myriad of difficult decisions that had not been explicitly trained in upgrade syllabi. Given the distance and fuel constraints, we only had about 15 minutes to spend on scene. Once on scene, we deployed our Rescue Swimmer to evaluate the patient and prepare her for hoisting. The patient’s father would accompany her on the long trip back to the hospital. Just as we had our plan set, the patient’s mother asked if she could come too. I had to make a tough and emotional decision in a split moment. We did not have much fuel, and every extra hoist would push us even further beyond the Flight Surgeon’s recommended rescue timeline. But the patient was not doing well. What if the worst happened enroute to the hospital and my decision was the reason her mother was not there with her? In mere seconds, my compassion and coherence competed for the answer. No, we would not bring the mother. After hoisting the patient, her father, and the Rescue Swimmer, we began the long overwater transit back to shore. During the flight back, my attention to flying was challenged by fear that I had made the wrong decision.
We delivered the patient to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida in critical condition. I later learned that just minutes after we dropped the patient off, she went into septic shock. The doctors saved her, and she eventually made a full recovery. If I had delayed her transport to the hospital by even minutes to hoist the mother, we might not have arrived at the same happy outcome. However, the benefit of hindsight is not a luxury we have when making difficult on-scene decisions, and not all missions have the same cheery outcome. This operation illustrated to me how mentally taxing our job can be. The unpredictable and demanding nature of our jobs as Naval Aviators requires not only physical skill and technical expertise but also psychological toughness. In many instances, mental resilience among Naval Aviators can be the deciding factor between mission success and failure.
Across the maritime flying services, but especially in the Coast Guard, we are asked to operate low and close to the water in suboptimal conditions while executing technically challenging missions. We routinely experience significant cognitive load— the extensive mental effort to simultaneously process multiple streams of information in high-stress environments. Deep within the brain, the amygdala is activated, and a complex yet rapid process begins to release stress hormones that physiologically prepare our bodies to react. While this process can provide us with increased energy, alertness, and focus, there are also cognitive consequences. Peripheral awareness suffers. Our working memory is downregulated. We can react emotionally instead of deliberately. And, in some cases, we lose the bubble to the detriment of safety. Training mental resilience is an essential step in developing aircraft commanders who can get the job done, time after time, in high-stress environments. How we train it, though, is less straightforward.
Throughout my upgrade journey from Student Naval Aviator to Flight Examiner, I remember being told that some instructors are harsh on students to create the simulated stress necessary to build mental resilience. While simulated stress is critical to development, I also believe some instructors rely so entirely on ubiquitous abrasiveness they forget why they do what they do. Being an instructional “hammer” is, in and of itself, not the cure to training mental resilience and may be an indicator of simply being an unpleasant person. Intentionally exposing student pilots to increasing levels of stress in controlled environments, stress inoculation, should be a deliberate and measured endeavor. Stress should be applied differently throughout a student’s pipeline at pressure points of maturation. Furthermore, stress inoculation should be used at moments and decisions of consequence, not in a random walk of anxiety-inducing moments. I care more about applying stress to highlight the criticality of a decision gate far more than I care about demoralizing a young pilot for a sloppy traffic pattern. Still, instructors must be cautious of the fine line between stress inoculation and demoralization. After all, we are flying with and training the people we want to replace us and be better than us. Maintaining that balance is one of the tremendous burdens of being an instructor, and it is one that I routinely must self-evaluate to ensure I have not become that which I loathed as a student.
Teaching decision-making models like the OODA loop, and emphasizing crew resource management skills (we love DAMCLAS) are essential for equipping pilots with frameworks for untangling complex scenarios. However, structured decision-making cannot be a complete substitute for intuitive decision-making. Future aircraft commanders must synthesize methodical approaches and trained instincts to make difficult onscene decisions, often far away from the nearest O-5 to decide for them. And once the mission is over, psychologically tough aviators must recognize the need for recovery. Managing post-flight mental fatigue is as vital as managing physiological fatigue. Chronic mental stress erodes effective decision-making capacity and threatens mission success. Instructors should strengthen mental resilience with deliberate stress inoculation during upgrade flights while also recognizing it is not a silver bullet. A solid foundation of knowledge, scenario-based training, mental rehearsal, constructive debriefs, and controlled breathing exercises all contribute to a pilot’s “bandwidth reservoir,” empowering the mental clarity needed to make the right decisions onscene. Finally, instructors must encourage the appropriate post-flight self-care to sustain a pilot’s mental resilience throughout a long, fruitful career.
About the Author
LT Hendrickson is the Command Safety Officer and an MH60T Instructor Pilot and Flight Examiner at Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater.
