How stressful is air traffic control?
Stress is a physiological syndrome. You feel it when are put under mental or physical constraint. Stress can be a positive and necessary stimulator of action to help you work out a difficult situation. Due to its multivariate pattern, stress might also be inappropriate to solve the problems with which you are faced. Obviously, some aspects of the air traffic controller tasks make the mental workload rather high (monitoring and managing routine traffic, switching attention, solving conflicts, updating spatial mental picture, providing services). A high level of stress, including its physical component, might therefore be undesirable. Nevertheless, the tolerances to stress manifestation vary from one individual to another. It is then not easy to say whether air traffic control is a stressing activity as such. In a recent survey about professional attitudes amongst controllers at Maastricht a large majority of the responses showed that controllers see themselves as able to rest and relax
