Tension in the Cockpit: A Deep Dive into What It Does and How to Manage It
What changed in you before your flying changed?
Guest blog by Alexandra Johnson - The Flying Physio
We talk a lot about pressure in aviation in relation to decision making, workload, attention and situational awareness. All of it matters. But something can shift even earlier: what the body starts doing before the change becomes visible in someone's flying.
As a chartered physiotherapist and student helicopter pilot, I know that flying is not only about controlling the aircraft. You may also be listening to the radio, checking instruments, looking out for other aircraft and managing several tasks at once.
Pressure, or something that happened during a previous flight, can change how you do all of that. You might grip the cyclic or yoke instead of holding it lightly, stop feeling what the aircraft is telling you through the controls and begin to overcontrol. The body is not simply reacting alongside the flying. It can be changing the flying.
Rather than looking only at what happened during the flight, there is another question worth asking: what changed in you before your flying changed?
The flight that didn't feel right
One of my clients, a helicopter pilot, came to me after a flight because something had not felt right and he could not explain why.
Just after take off, his son told him that the door had not shut properly. He dealt with it, followed his training and carried on. Later, as they flew over Brighton Pier, the bank felt steeper than he expected and the turn was not as smooth as it would normally have been. The helicopter remained within its limits and nothing major happened, but he knew the flight had changed.
It would have been easy to look only at the turn, the bank and the control inputs. Those things matter, but I wanted to understand what had happened before them. The door had been sorted, yet the surprise had taken up some of his attention. By the time he reached the pier, he was tense, distracted and no longer enjoying the flight.
He had handled the problem properly, but his body had not necessarily returned to how it had been beforehand. A reaction can continue as a different grip, more force or an expectation that something else will go wrong. Difficulty can then arise if you decide this means you cannot cope or trust yourself. That belief may influence what you do next, from repeatedly checking something you know is correct to avoiding anything less predictable.
Try this for yourself
Put one arm out in front of you and clench your fist as hard as you can. Keep it clenched and move your arm around. You can still move, but you will probably feel more tension through your hand and forearm, perhaps extending into your shoulder and neck. You are using more effort than the movement requires.
Now open your hand and move your arm again. You have not learnt anything new, become stronger or fixed anything. You have simply changed the way you are moving, and that immediately gives you more options.
The same principle can apply in an aircraft. You can complete the checks, fly and land while gripping harder than usual, carrying extra tension or devoting so much attention to one part of the flight that you have less available for everything else. Nothing may look obviously wrong from the outside, which is precisely why these changes can be missed. Flying is not only about completing the task in front of you. It is also about having enough capacity left when the task changes.
What could you start noticing?
During your next flight, once you are safely established and only when workload allows, or when reviewing the flight afterwards, notice whether anything feels different from normal for you.
- Are you gripping the controls harder?
- Are you holding tension through your shoulders, jaw or hands?
- Are you checking something again even though you already know it is right?
- Are you moving easily between tasks, or have you become fixed on one thing?
- Are you still enjoying the flight?
The aim is not to turn every bit of tension into a problem. Your body is meant to react when something matters. The useful question is whether that response is helping you deal with what is happening now, or whether you are still reacting to something that has already finished.
Instructors can look for similar changes in students. Some become faster and louder. Others become very still, stop asking questions or look for reassurance. After my keynote at SleapKosh, a flight instructor described students going completely blank during assessments even though they understood what to do.
Sometimes a student does need more training. At other times, pressure has changed the way their body is responding and they cannot access what they already know in the same way. If we look only at the result, those two situations can appear identical.
What movement hacking actually means
Movement hacking looks at the difference between what you know you can do and what your body is doing when you try to do it. It considers what is influencing that response, what you begin to believe because of it and how those beliefs affect what you do next.
With the helicopter pilot, I was not questioning whether he could fly the turn. I wanted to understand what changed after the problem with the door, what his body was doing by the time he reached the pier and what meaning he gave that experience afterwards. This is the basis of The Movement Hacking Project, the framework behind my work as The Flying Physio.
Where The Movement Hacking Project came from
The project grew from my own experience as well as my professional background. I was born with Klippel-Trenaunay syndrome, a rare condition affecting my left leg. At 13, I had surgery and was told that I would not run again or have normal function. Years later, after the metalwork was removed, I began to question whether that was still the whole truth about what my body could do. I went on to complete the Marathon des Sables, become an elite triathlete and race at two Ironman 70.3 World Championships.
I later crashed my bike while training. Beyond the physical injury, I began moving protectively and expecting my body to struggle before I had asked it to do anything. Resolving the injury did not automatically restore my movement, trust or freedom.
That experience helped shape The Movement Hacking Project. I have since used the framework with clients, including pilots, and in my keynote at SleapKosh. Again and again, people described knowing what to do and having trained properly, yet being unable to use that knowledge in the same way under pressure.
What happens in a Movement Audit?
A Movement Audit is an online, one to one session focused on one thing that has changed. For a pilot, that might be a manoeuvre that no longer feels the same, a route you avoid, using the radio when it becomes busy or simply no longer enjoying flying as you once did.
We look at what happened, what changed in you and what you decided that reaction meant. We also compare it with a flight in which the difficulty does not occur. You are still the same pilot and your skills have not disappeared, so what is different?
This can help identify whether further training may be useful, whether something physical is affecting how you move or function, or whether one experience has changed what you now expect to happen. Those are not the same things, so they may not need the same response.
Before your next flight
Understanding these physical signs does not replace aviation training, an appropriate debrief or medical advice. It adds another part to the conversation. If a flight has not felt right lately, review what happened, then consider whether you are holding on harder than necessary, repeatedly checking or becoming fixed on one task.
A difficult flight does not automatically mean that you have lost your ability. It may mean that something has changed and you now have somewhere more useful to look. Do not only ask what changed in the flight. Ask yourself: what changed in you before your flying changed?
Alexandra Johnson is The Flying Physio, a chartered physiotherapist, owner of PhysioFit Pilates and Physio Studio and a student helicopter pilot. She created The Movement Hacking Project framework to explore human performance through movement and physical function, and how beliefs and behaviour can affect what you do next.
