Personality profiling of flying instructor and trainee instructor
Introduction: Military flying entails sound psychological health along with a high level of skill and aptitude. Pilots are selected on the basis of their psychological profile, psychomotor ability, and cognitive ability. Hence, the performance of pilots can be construed as a product of skill, attitude, and personality factors. Personality factors and cognitive ability have a vast impact on the flying performance and flight safety. This acquires a whole new dimension for flying instructors, as teaching the nuances of flying to a young flight cadet is a very challenging task. Materials and Methods: To study the personality and cognitive profile of the special group of flight instructors, 45 instructors and trainee instructors from flying instructors’ school, Tambaram, were administered NEO five- factor inventory and four cognitive tests comprising Stroop test, symbol-digit coding and digit span-backward and forward. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-test, and analysis of variance. Results and Discussion: Trainees and instructors constituted the sample wherein they were considered as a common group; hence, comparison between them was not carried out. The aircrew manifested emotional stability, high extraversion, willingness to experience novel experiences, low to average agreeableness, and average to very high conscientiousness. Their cognitive performance was compared with available norms for general population and was found to be above average. No significant difference was found in the personality dimensions or cognitive performance on the basis of mode of entry, stream, marital status, etc. Conclusion: Instructors came out to be more emotionally balanced, extraverted, and keen to have new experiences and had high conscientiousness compared to non-instructor pilots. The instructors showed above- average performance when compared to normative data provided by the test authors. It has implications for future studies with large samples and similar protocols.