The Middle Aged Aviator

[Music] greetings folks my name is rod Machado and I'd like to talk to you about the pachyderm in the parlor I mean your cognitive skills between the ages of 40 to your late 60s in other words middle age and how this affects you as a pilot the fact is that our pilot population is aging and most pilots want to know if they're still safe to fly when entering the fourth quarter of life the good news is that we're aging much more gracefully nowadays let's not forget that the good Senator John Glenn rode the Space Shuttle into orbit at 77 years of age yes it's true that the senator wanted to do a space walk and NASA said no III think they were worried that he might go outside and and wander off keep in mind that this topic is valuable for all middle-aged pilots as well as the flight instructors young or older that will be teaching them so there's something here for everybody so grab your Walker strap on that oxygen tank and let's roll ok let let's mosey oh yeah I think that's better well begin with the bad news about aging as you age your physical reflexes slow down big surprise you know it's unlikely that you'll ever get so slow that you could be run over by two guys pushing a car with a flat tire so no worries there fortunately you do not need the reflexes of a kung-fu fighter to fly an airplane safely in fact one of the very important rules you learn about the physical act of flying an airplane is that slow is smooth and smooth is fast you don't need to be fast to be a general aviation pilot especially a safe one if you can drive a car safely then your physical reflexes are sufficient for learning how to fly an airplane let there be no doubt that we decline physically in other areas as we age by our 70s and 80s we might have lost as much as 20 to 30 degrees of peripheral vision which means we often have to learn a different way to perceive when to flare an airplane well we might also lose our color vision and near vision and often we begin to see floaters spots and sprites in our visual field and unless we exercise and maintain good posture we might eventually look like we're a recent graduate of the Quasimodo posture school but you probably already knew this right right what concerns most folks however it's their cognitive decline with age yes we do experience cognitive decline with age some people more than others the problem is that we have very little data on how aging actually affects pilots you see most of the studies on aging over the past half century or conducted on folks in nursing homes now isn't this kind of like reading the obituaries for health tips hmm most folks in nursing homes have already experienced significant decline however there are a few recent studies on cognitive performance with age and their worth recognizing for instance dr. sherri willis at penn state universities involved with an ongoing aging study of over 6,000 people that began in 1956 and her research indicates that we experience cognitive decline in two areas notably distraction and processing speed however her research also indicates that we experience a cognitive increase in four other areas vocabulary verbal memory spatial orientation and most important inductive reasoning and that's our ability to generate and test new hypotheses and this study found that we do better on cognitive tests up to age 65 than we did in our 20s in short we become better at problem solving in middle age and that is extremely important especially for a pilot another study on cognition was done by dr. Paul Bal T's at the Max Planck Institute this is where they do some great thinking over there at the Max Planck Institute and I guess now we know why we don't hear anything from the folks at the men Planck Institute you see dr. ball T's found that the quality we call wisdom is greatest when we reached 65 years of age dr. ball T's suggests that in middle age we experience small declines but experience huge gains in our ability to see connections then there's Pat Kramer at the University of Illinois who studied the cognitive performance of air traffic controllers now in the United States air traffic controllers have a mandatory retirement age of 56 but not in Canada where it's much older so dr. Kramer packed up his bags went to Canada and tested the cognitive abilities of young and older controllers and he found that young younger controllers did a better job at cognitive processing speed big surprise however older controllers did just as well as younger controllers in two important areas visualizing in three dimensions and ambiguity or coping with conflicting or insufficient information the kind of information that essentially air traffic controllers deal with all the time unfortunately it turns out that there are very few studies that specifically focused on general aviation pilots but one such study was conducted by dr. joy Taylor at the Stanford aging Center and it involved 118 pilots using flight simulators now these pilots were between 40 and 69 years of age and the study ran over a three-year period and tested a pilot's ability at communicating traffic awareness and situational awareness not surprisingly miss Taylor found that older older pilots did not do as well the first time they used the simulator however as the tests were repeated the older pilots actually became better than the younger pilots at the essential skills that this study intended to measure and those skills were avoiding traffic and situational awareness dr. Taylor study revealed one essential idea that all pilots need to recognize and that is if we keep proficient and practice our skills those skills will remain at a very high level well into middle so keep in mind that as we age we're more likely to identify our declines but not realize our gains after all these four studies indicate that wisdom peaks at 65 and even in middle age were able to maintain a high level of situational awareness abstract thinking inductive reasoning and pattern recognition and you should find a great deal of comfort in those results but wait you say as an older person I can't seem to remember anyone's name anymore and I'm worried that I'm going senile well I can assure you that not remembering names is not at all uncommon beyond the age of 35 and here's where it's important to know something about how your brain works you see dr. Deborah Burke at Pomona College in California tells us that names go missing because of the way the brain organizes and stores its information it turns out that the sound associated with a name its phonology and the physical person who owns that name those two things are stored in different areas of the brain and over time with aging that connection weakens making it more difficult to remember that person's name and again we don't have much trouble remembering someone's occupation because this information becomes associated and stored in similar locations along with the identity of the person in question additionally as we age we know so many more people to the extent that it becomes much more difficult to keep track of them all well knowing how your brain works allows you to understand one of the pilots biggest and I say biggest cognitive challenges that they experience during middle age and I'm speaking of the ability to be easily distracted according to researcher dr. Cheryl Grady a portion of our brain known as the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex is what allows us to maintain our concentration on any task now the DPC is located about two inches behind the forehead right about there now I don't poke it with your finger either as we age dr. grady discovered that we use less of the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and instead go to a place that she calls the default area of the brain and yes you can poke that with your finger if it pleases you the default area of our brain is the place we go to daydream well isn't that just lovely the last thing a pilot needs to do is start daydreaming during critical portions of flight while aloft no wonder NASA was reluctant to let the good senator Glenn go for a spacewalk in middle age we lose a little of our ability to switch off the default area and maintain our focus via the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex unless of course we develop strategies to compensate for this fortunately this is a relatively easy thing to do through something known as self-talk dialogues over the years I've developed quite a few self-talk dialogues or strategies to keep students especially older students on task for instance during an instrument approach while approaching the final approach fix the phrase how low how long which way helps a pilot maintain attention attention according to what's important at the time now during an approach to any Airport and pilot might repeat where am I going how do I get there and what do I do next and hopefully they'll say this silently because it does make the passengers nervous once said out loud and there are many self-talk dialogues and strategies that can help planets focus on what's important at the time and there's no reason that you shouldn't use them I use them all the time so there you have it we do experience some cognitive decline as we age but it turns out that we gain in other areas that are essential to safe flying of course there may come a day when you have to make big changes perhaps even giving up flying like the day my grandfather started wearing a lanyard around his reading glasses to keep from losing them that's right he kept 'miss placing his glass slipping on pair after pair not realizing that he was pushing each pair up over his hairline we were all worried that one day he'd go outside in bright sunlight and start a fire on top his head well if you'd like to learn more about aging and middle age pick up a copy of this book by barbara Strauch it's an excellent primer on the subject folks I've been Rob Machado and may your air traffic controllers never speak at 60 with peak gusts to 90 hello folks Rob Machado again if you're interested in the ultimate rusty pilot refresher course and I do mean ultimate then please take a look at my new 40 hour interactive e-learning Private Pilot ground school not only will you have lifetime access to all the essential Private Pilot material you can also count on it being updated with every significant change made by the FAA and if you're an IFR pilot and want to take your I of our knowledge game to the next level then please consider owning my eight hour secrets of instrument approaches and departures elearning course

Channel: Rod Machado

Views: 27,863

Keywords: flying, middle age pilots, aviation and age, flying and age, age related pilot issues, pilot, instructor, teaching older pilots, too old to fly, aviation, flight instructor, CFI, older pilots, flying and cognition, learn to fly, private pilot, commercial pilot, airline pilot, age and airline career, Cessna, Piper, flight training, older students

Id: CjCNhk2iZ20

Length: 12min 28sec (748 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2019