Hi there,
let me introduce some thoughts here.
Ten years ago we completed a survey with a 100 issue questionaire in
cabin
crew population in our country.
We suspected that there were a lot of flight attendants in very bad
psychological conditions due to labor conditions, accidents and
incidents,
hijackings, unconscistent selection policies, ambigüity of their proper
aeronautical status (safety VS. commertial), etc.
What we found was a high percentage of "maladaptive flight syndromes",
for
example, fear of flying, flight phobia, substance abuse, etc.
The theoretical considerations of that construct was published in
Aviation,
Space and Environmental Medicine ("The Right and Wrong Stuff in Civil
Aviation", 1988; 59:955-9).
The results with the 43 flight attendants that suffered a hijack were
presented at the 17th Scientific Meeting of the Western European Assn.
Av.
Psych. 1987. And the final report at the Int'l Flight Att. Assn. Meeting
at
Dublin two years later.
The final report of that study was a book named "Secondary Flying
Maladptive
Syndromes", 1989, Sociedad Interamericana de Psicología Aeronáutica,
Buenos
Aires (in spanish, regretably), 245 pages.
>From that study, we learned that motivation was an issue, and also the
so
called "defense mechanisms", in order to grant a healthy "flying
adaptation
syndrome".
So in CRM seminars for this personnel we always introduce a module
addressed
to discus this problems: Management of the Flying Adaptation Syndrome.
Some
times those workshops transform themselves in group therapy.
Greetings from Buenos Aires
Hugo