The Mental Checkride: A Pilot's Guide to Performing Under Pressure

• A checkride is a performance, not a flight. Your job is to keep arousal in the productive zone, not eliminate nerves.
• Build and rehearse a routine. Same dinner, same drive, same walk-around. Familiarity is the antidote to spiraling.
• You will make a mistake. The mistake almost never busts you, the spiral does. Release, reset, refocus inside three seconds.
• Practice the mental tools (breathing, visualization, the reset) during training. Not on checkride day.

Skip to a section

• Build your pre-checkride routine
• How to release a mistake mid-ride
• How to visualize a maneuver effectively
• The pre-checkride game plan timeline

Hey. So you've got a checkride coming up. Maybe your CFI, maybe your private, maybe a Phase III in pilot training.

I know that feeling. The one where you're supposedly ready - your CFI says you're ready, your hours are there, you've flown the maneuvers a hundred times. And yet you wake up at 3 a.m. running through the lost-comm procedure for the fourth time. The one where you can't tell if the knot in your stomach is excitement or dread or last night's coffee.

Here's the thing nobody tells you clearly enough: a checkride isn't really a flight. It's a performance under evaluation - and your brain absolutely knows the difference, even if your hands could fly the profile in your sleep. That's why pilots who are objectively ready still walk in shaky. Not because you're weak. Because performance pressure is its own animal.

I want to walk you through what I've learned about this - partly from busting my way through this stuff myself, partly from digging into what sports psychologists, neuroscientists, and the Air Force have learned about handling pressure. The same principles that get NFL kickers through Super Bowls and closers through the World Series apply directly to checkrides. They just don't get talked about much in flight schools.

This works whether you're a primary student trying to get your private, an instrument candidate, or a captain going for an upgrade. Civilian, military, doesn't matter. The brain works the same way.

Let's get into it.

First, Let's Talk About Why You Feel Like This

You're not broken. You're aroused. (Not that kind. Settle down.)

Back in 1908, two psychologists named Yerkes and Dodson published research that's still one of the most cited findings in performance psychology. The short version: there's an inverted-U relationship between arousal - your stress level, your alertness, your adrenaline - and performance. Too little, and you're flat and inattentive. Too much, and you fall apart. The sweet spot is in the middle.

Here's the part that matters for us as pilots: the more cognitively complex the task, the lower the optimum arousal point. A linebacker can be hyped up screaming before a play. A pilot running a partial-panel unusual attitude recovery while explaining their thought process to an examiner cannot. Our peak performance window is narrower than most.

When arousal goes too high, aviation human factors researchers have documented what happens to pilots in real cockpits. Load shedding, attention narrowing, what they call "stress-produced perceptual tunnelling." You stop scanning. You fixate on the airspeed tape and miss the altitude. You hear the examiner ask a question and the words just sort of bounce off you. A 2025 simulator study found exactly this. Pilot trainees who could fly perfectly fine in normal conditions saw their performance crater when high-urgency unexpected events were thrown at them. The hands still worked. The pressure ate them.

So here's the goal, and I want you to internalize this: you're not trying to eliminate the nerves. You're trying to keep them in the productive zone. Calm-but-engaged. Aware but not panicked. That's the target.

Mantras like "one pitch at a time" - what every elite closer in baseball will tell you they relied on - aren't just nice sayings. They're arousal management. By narrowing focus to one discrete task, you keep cognitive load from spiking past your useful zone. For us, it's one task at a time. Not "the whole checkride." Not even "the steep turns." It's: clear the airspace. Pick a reference. Roll in. Hold the bank. Hold the altitude. Roll out on heading. Then the next thing. And only the next thing.

A Story I Want You to Sit With: Jason Myers

Bear with me on this one. It's the best illustration I've come across of what a real pre-performance routine looks like.

Jason Myers is an NFL kicker for the Seahawks. In a Super Bowl a couple years back, he went 5-for-5 on field goal attempts and set a Super Bowl record for cumulative distance. One of the most clutch kicking performances in league history.

Right before kickoff (the Super Bowl, mind you) he walked back to the locker room and found the team's punter, Michael Dickson. Here's what he said:

"Dude, I feel kind of nervous because I feel so calm right now."

Read that again. He was so prepared, so deeply inside the routine he'd built over eleven years, that the calm itself felt weird. The punter said he'd been feeling the same way too and was relieved Myers said it first.

This is what we're aiming for. Not the absence of nerves - Myers had nerves. But a routine so deep that nothing on game day was new, and his body had nothing to spike about.

Here's what Myers actually does, week to week:

• Monday - writes detailed notes on his thoughts and technical plan for that week
• Wednesday/Thursday - kicks at practice
• Thursday at 7 p.m. - calls his sports psychologist. Every single Thursday. For eleven years.
• Final days - air reps, visualization, scripted thinking
• Sunday morning - minute-by-minute regimen. Stretching, shower, deep breaths
• Hours before kickoff - turns on the Golf Channel while talking to his family. Quiet sounds, athletes going through their own pre-shot routines. The perfect kind of distraction - present without being demanding.

In eleven years his sports psychologist says he's been late less than five times.

Why does this work neurologically? A familiar, scripted routine occupies your prefrontal cortex with low-cost automatic processing. It crowds out the catastrophic rumination ("what if I bust the oral?") that would otherwise eat your working memory. And it tells your nervous system we've been here before, this is fine, which dampens the cortisol response.

A 2021 meta-analysis out of Austria looked at studies on pre-performance rituals and found a "modest but reliable" performance benefit across the board. Other research has shown that structured behavioral and mental sequences before performance regulate emotions and even decrease the brain's natural response to failure.

So when I tell you to build a routine and stick to it, I'm not telling you to be superstitious. I'm telling you to do what Hall-of-Fame-level performers do because the science is clear it works.

The Breathing Thing

Here's a detail from the Myers story I need you to really hear.

Early in his career, his issue was tempo. Adrenaline would speed up his rhythm and he'd pull the ball. So he and his sports psychologist worked on his breathing - for over a year. Every week, after every practice, after every game: How was the breathing? Grade it. First kick, how was the breathing? Second kick, how was the breathing? Until it became automatic.

Now think about your own flying. When was the last time you graded your breathing after a maneuver? After your missed approach? After a power-off 180? Probably never. Most pilots don't think about it.

But your breathing is the only voluntary access you have to your autonomic nervous system. It's the lever you can pull to bring your arousal back into the productive zone when it spikes. Special operators use it. Fighter pilots use it. There's a version called box breathing - inhale 4, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4. The slow exhale activates your vagus nerve, which triggers a parasympathetic response that drops your heart rate. That's the mechanism.

When to use it on a checkride:

• During the oral, when the examiner is making notes between question groups
• In the run-up area before takeoff
• After a maneuver that didn't go great, before the next one starts
• Any time you feel your scan breaking down or that weird tunnel-hearing thing happening

But (and this is critical) practice it during training, not on the checkride. If it's brand new on the day, it won't work. Start grading your breathing on every flight from now until your ride, the way Myers did on every kick. By the time the DPE shows up, it should feel automatic.

Doing the Recon Work

Another thing Myers does that I love: he doesn't just visualize generically. He digs.

Before a game in Jacksonville, he told his sports psychologist he was concerned because the Jaguars had played the previous week in their throwback uniforms. That meant they'd used a different logo at midfield. That meant the grounds crew would have re-sodded the patch. That meant there was going to be a seam in the grass around the 40-yard line.

He planned to have his holder shift the ball four or five inches on any kick from that area to avoid putting his plant foot on the seam.

He made the kick.

That level of preparation is available to you. Specifically:

• Know your aircraft's quirks. Does it want to roll left on takeoff? Where does the trim wheel sit at typical cruise? Where does the stall horn really break versus where the manual claims?
• Know your airport. Which taxiway crosses the active? Where's the windsock? Is there a hill on short final to one of the runways that the wind likes to roll over? You've probably noticed all this; consciously inventory it.
• Know your examiner. If you can talk to recent applicants from your school, do. Most DPEs have characteristic styles - some love diversions, some grill on weather, some will ream you on systems. It's not cheating, it's reconnaissance. Every pro performer does it.
• Know the conditions. Density altitude, winds aloft, turbulence reports. Walk the airplane the way Myers walks the field.

Talking to Yourself the Right Way

One more piece of the Myers playbook. He and his sports psychologist scripted his internal monologue.

He kept a notebook. He wrote down why he was a great kicker. Concrete reasons, not vague affirmations: I have a powerful leg. I trust my technique. I know my targets. And he had key swing thoughts for the actual kick: wide plant. Great contact. Head down.

You can do this exactly. For each maneuver, distill it down to three or four anchor words. A power-off 180: abeam, idle, configure, aim. A steep turn: clear, pick, roll, hold. A short-field landing: speed, threshold, idle, brake.

These aren't replacements for procedure. They're verbal anchors that pin your prefrontal cortex to the next concrete action so it doesn't drift into outcome thoughts ("don't bust this").

And the night before the ride - write down why you deserve to pass. Concrete reasons. Not "I'm a great pilot." More like: I have flown 50 hours dual. My CFI signed me off. I made the standards on the last three flights. I know the regs cold. Read it the morning of the ride. I'm telling you, this matters more than it sounds.

Building Your Routine

Okay, your turn. Don't leave any of this to chance. The night before and the morning of are the worst possible time to invent procedures. Steal Myers's approach and script it out.

Two weeks out - ideally, no new material. Now, full disclosure: I know that's not always realistic. Maybe your CFI noticed something in your last lesson. Maybe a weather day pushed your timeline. Maybe you're catching an oral question from a friend's bust that you suddenly realize you can't answer. Things come up. The goal is no new material because confidence is built on repetition of the known, not exposure to the unknown - but if you have to introduce something new, do it deliberately and early in those two weeks, not the night before. The closer you get to ride day, the more strictly you should be reviewing only what you already know. (If you're working from Backseat Pilot's CFI lesson plans, that "review the known" phase is exactly what they're built for. No scrambling to format your own materials in week 13.)

Week of - same daily rhythm. Same study blocks. Sleep is the highest-leverage thing you can do.

Night before - same dinner you've had before successful training flights. Charts and weather review at the same time you'd normally do them. Lights out at the same time. Read your "why I deserve to pass" list before bed. (Yes, really.)

Morning of - same wake-up time, same breakfast, same drive route. Get to the airport early enough that nothing feels rushed. Find your version of the Golf Channel. Something familiar and quiet that occupies your mind without engaging it. For me it was a particular podcast I'd already heard. For you it might be a playlist or a YouTube video or just looking at sectional charts you've looked at a hundred times.

Pre-flight ritual - walk-around in the same order. Cockpit setup in the same sequence. Brief yourself out loud the way you'd brief a passenger.

In the run-up area - a specific 60-second mental sequence. Some version of breathe, scan, commit.

The routine itself matters less than the fact that it's the same routine you used during training. That's the link to your already-successful flights. You're telling your nervous system: we've done this exact thing, and it worked.

The One Skill That Matters Most: Shaking Off Mistakes

Okay, this is the part I really want you to hear. If you take nothing else from this whole article, take this section.

You are going to make a mistake on your checkride.

I'm not being negative, I'm being realistic. You're going to be 50 feet high on a level-off, or you'll forget a callout, or you'll botch a radio call, or you'll hesitate on a question during the oral. No checkride is perfect. None of mine were. None of your CFI's were. None of your examiner's were either, when they took theirs. Examiners and IPs aren't grading perfection. They're grading whether you noticed the deviation, corrected it, and stayed safe.

What busts people isn't the mistake. It's what happens in the next sixty seconds.

Sport psychology research has identified this as one of the clearest dividers between elite and amateur performers. Studies show elite athletes refocus faster on the next task than amateurs do. The skill is sometimes called resetting - recentering on the present moment and staying emotionally in control. The pros make mistakes too. They just get back to the next play faster.

NBA forward Aaron Gordon described it perfectly during a Nuggets playoff push: "On the court, you want to be icy. You want to be really cool. You want to be composed. And when your mental state is not right on the court, you do stupid things, like get technical fouls or compound mistakes. Like, say you miss a shot, you're mad that you missed a shot, so you turn around and foul somebody 80 feet away from the basket."

That's the spiral. And in the cockpit it looks like this: you blow the steep turn altitude. You get pissed at yourself. You stew through the next two minutes of cruise. You get to slow flight and your scan is gone because half your brain is still arguing with the steep turn. Now you're behind on the configuration. Now you're high on the approach. Now the examiner is writing things down.

Two mistakes can become five very fast. And five mistakes is a bust.

So here's the framework, straight out of sport psychology, and it works:

Release. Reset. Refocus.

Release. Acknowledge the mistake without judgment. Don't say "I'm so stupid." Don't catastrophize ("this is over"). Just name it: I was 100 high on the rollout. That's it. The mistake exists. You can't change it. Pretending it didn't happen doesn't work - your brain knows you're lying. But spinning on it doesn't help either. Just acknowledge it cleanly, almost neutrally, like you'd note the weather.

Reset. A physical anchor. The fastest one is a single deliberate exhale. Some pilots tap a knee or touch the trim wheel. Some say a cue word out loud - "next" or "move on" or just "fly the airplane." Whatever it is, it should be the same every time, and you should be using it during regular training so it's automatic.

Refocus. Bring your attention to the very next concrete task. Not the whole checkride. Not the next maneuver. The next thing you have to do right now: trim, scan, callout, configure. Specific, present, observable.

Here's what the bad version sounds like in your head:

Oh no I was 50 high and now they're going to fail me and I knew I shouldn't have eaten that breakfast and the wind correction angle on the next maneuver I bet I'm going to mess that up too and my CFI's gonna be so disappointed and-

And here's what the good version sounds like, even out loud:

Fifty high on the rollout. Rolling out on heading now. Trim. Scan. Next is slow flight - clean configuration first.

Notice the difference? The bad version is past- and future-focused - replaying the mistake, projecting forward to a bust. The good version acknowledges the past and immediately gets present. Both kill you when you're past or future. The reset pulls you back to now.

Here's a useful reframe sport psychologists use: separate your mind from your body. Your body performs slightly differently every day. Reps, hydration, sleep, stress, turbulence - they all affect your output. Your job isn't to make your body perfect today. Your job is to make sure your mind was in the right place. If your scan was right, your inputs were right, your decision-making was right, and the airplane still drifted 50 feet because of a thermal - you did your job. Move on.

This is how examiners think too. They know aircraft drift. They know turbulence is real. They know nobody hits every altitude to the inch. What they're watching is your mind - did you notice? Did you correct? Did you stay ahead of the airplane?

Practice this in training. Next time you blow a maneuver during a lesson - and you will - don't let it slide and don't dwell on it. Run your release-reset-refocus right then. Build the muscle so it's there on the day. I cannot overstate how much this single skill matters.

Let me tell you a story

I want to share this because I want you to actually believe what I just told you.

I failed a checkride in Air Force pilot training. The very first takeoff of the checkride - I'd flown plenty of takeoffs in training before this, but this was the one that counted. As I taxied onto the runway, another aircraft was exiting at the far end and I let it pull my attention for a beat too long. I pushed the power up, and I'd forgotten to disconnect the nosewheel steering.

The first words out of my examiner's mouth as the throttles came up were, "I have the aircraft."

I knew exactly what I'd done before he finished the sentence. The kind of mistake where you feel it in your stomach before your brain catches up. The first action of the entire ride, and I'd blown it.

Here's what I want you to hear, though: I didn't have time to spiral, because I'd already trained myself not to. He took the airplane, we cleared up the situation, and we kept going. I flew the rest of the ride. I made the call early - that's done, I can't change it, fly the next minute clean - and I just… kept flying. One task at a time. One callout at a time.

I ended that checkride with one of the highest overall scores in my class. While failing it. Because the rest of the flight, after that opening, was clean.

I retook the ride a couple days later and passed. And, I'll say this humbly because the only reason it's worth mentioning is what it proves: I went on to graduate number one in my pilot training class.

The reason I'm telling you this is to show you that the worst possible start to a checkride, literally failing the first action of the flight, does not have to define what comes next. The release-reset-refocus skill works. I know it works because it worked for me on the worst day of my training.

If you make a mistake on your ride, you are not the first. You will not be the last. And the mistake is almost never what determines whether you pass. What determines it is whether you can fly the next minute like the last one didn't happen.

Visualization (a.k.a. Free Practice)

Most pilots vaguely know "chair-flying" is a thing. Few realize what's happening in the brain when you do it.

When you mentally rehearse a maneuver in vivid detail (feeling the controls, hearing the engine, seeing the picture out the windscreen) your brain activates many of the same neural circuits that fire during the actual movement. fMRI studies confirm this. It's measurable, not metaphor. And the effect is biggest for skills you've already learned but haven't yet perfected, exactly where you are right now.

A 2025 study in the journal PNAS mapped this at the cortical level. Expert performers showed lower brain activation than novices when imagining simple actions (more efficient, cleaner neural pathways) but more activation for complex actions (richer simulation). Translation: the better you get, the more your brain treats vivid mental rehearsal as real practice.

This is why elite military pilots use it heavily. Visualizing critical situations, mentally rehearsing emergency sequences, controlling stress through cardiac coherence techniques. It's also baked into the U.S. Air Force's CRAFT program, Comprehensive Readiness for Aircrew Flying Training, that they rolled out across UPT in 2023. Higher graduation rates. Higher scores. Better retention. Students learn breathing techniques, positive self-talk, and (this is huge) to save the close analysis of mistakes for the debrief afterwards.

That's the reset principle, formalized into Air Force doctrine.

How to visualize so it counts:

• First-person, full sensory. Don't watch yourself like a movie. Be in the seat. See the ASI in your peripheral vision. Feel the throttle. Hear the stall horn at the right moment.
• Real time. A power-off 180 takes 90 seconds. Your visualization should too. Slow-motion rehearsal builds different pathways than real-time.
• Include the failures and recoveries. Picture a botched flare. Then picture yourself recognizing it, going around, briefing it cleanly. You're rehearsing the recovery as much as the success. Military aviators do this constantly - running emergency procedures in their heads on every drive home. There's a reason.
• Specific to your checkride. Visualize your examiner if you've met them. Your home airport's runway. The exact taxiway. Specificity transfers.

Why the Mental Side Matters More Than You Think

Tennis great Rafael Nadal once said something that's stuck with me: the difference between the world's 10th-ranked player and the 500th-ranked wouldn't be visible to your eye in warmups. Tennis, he said, is a sport of the mind. The player who isolates himself best from his fears and from the inevitable ups and downs. That's the one who ends up number one.

Same in checkrides. The candidate who passes first try and the one who busts often look identical during pattern work the week before. Both can land. Both can do steep turns to ACS standards. The difference is what happens between their ears when the examiner says "Show me a power-off 180 to a full stop." This is especially true for the CFI checkride, which has a reputation as one of the toughest practical tests in aviation for a reason. It tests not just whether you can fly, but whether you can teach while flying, all while the DPE pushes back on every answer. The mental load is real.

This is why the FAA has shifted toward emphasizing Aeronautical Decision Making and risk management. They know technical skills are necessary but not sufficient. The cockpit always presents situations that demand judgment under uncertainty. Mental skills are what let your technical skills survive contact with reality.

Combat pilot training is even more explicit about it. Pilots get stress inoculation (controlled exposure to chaos to build resilience) alongside mental checklists, breathing exercises, and visualization. The hardware filters for the people who can handle the hardware.

If you're a primary student, you might think this stuff is for fighter pilots and line captains. They're not. The mental skills compound. The student who builds them now will have a massive advantage at the instrument, commercial, and ATP levels, and in the line operations after.

A Word on Perfectionism

Most pilots are perfectionists. (You know who you are.) The trait helps you study. It will kill you on a checkride if you let it.

Perfectionism narrows your definition of success ("I cannot make any mistakes") to a window so small that any deviation triggers a stress response. Once that response triggers mid-maneuver, your performance degrades, which produces more deviations, which triggers more stress. It's a feedback loop, and it's real. Aviation training programs explicitly warn about it.

The reframe, straight out of sport psychology, is to redefine success as executing your process well. Not "no mistakes." Process. Did you scan? Did you trim? Did you talk to yourself the way you do on a good flight? Did you correct deviations promptly? That's the metric.

Here's a great example. Collin Morikawa is a major-winning golfer who went 847 days without a tour win as he wrestled with perfectionism. On the final hole of the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, leading the tournament, he had to wait 20 minutes to hit his next shot. An excruciating delay. Instead of stewing, he stared out at the Pacific Ocean. Wasn't accidental. He'd built that exact skill with his mental coach for exactly that kind of moment. He hit the next shot great and won the tournament.

You'll have your Pebble Beach moments on a checkride. Sitting in the run-up holding for IFR release. The examiner making notes after a maneuver and the silence is killing you. Look outside. Notice the windsock. Take a breath. Don't let the wait turn into rumination.

I'll say it again because it bears repeating: examiners aren't looking for perfection. They're looking for a safe pilot who notices deviations and corrects them. Be that pilot. Don't try to be a flawless one.

If You Bust

Look, I hope you don't. But if you do, here's the truth: a bust is a data point, not a verdict.

The thing that screws people after a bust isn't the bust itself. It's the cycle that can follow. The doubt, the anxiety, the fear of future failure that builds into a feedback loop where pressure and self-doubt undermine the next attempt. The cycle is the real enemy, not the bust. Most pilots who go on to long careers had at least one rough event somewhere. The recovery skill is what separates careers from cautionary tales.

Same debrief structure as elite closers use after blowing a save:

1. What happened? Just facts, no blame yet. "Altitude was 100 low at the rollout. Examiner had to prompt me on the lost-comm procedure."
2. Why? Knowledge gap? Skill gap? Nerves? Distraction? Be ruthlessly specific.
3. What's the fix? Concrete, actionable, and practiced before the retake. "I'll be more careful" is not a fix.

Then trust the process again. The next ride is the next pitch.

Putting It All Together: Your Pre-Checkride Game Plan

Here's the timeline:

Two weeks out:

• Stop introducing new material if at all possible. That's the goal. If you have to add something, do it now, not next week.
• Daily 10-minute visualization sessions. One maneuver per day. Real-time, first-person, full sensory.
• Practice tactical breathing daily so it's automatic when you need it.
• Start grading your breathing on every training flight.
• Practice release-reset-refocus every time you make a mistake during training.

Week of:

• Sleep is the highest-leverage thing you can do now. Protect it ruthlessly.
• Run the full oral mentally on a long drive. Out loud, no notes. Notice where you stutter. (Or run a mock oral with someone who's done this before. Saying it out loud to another human is closer to the real thing than driving alone.)
• Lock in your Day-Of routine and write it down. Don't trust memory under stress.
• Write your "why I deserve to pass" list.

Day before:

• Light review only. No marathon study sessions.
• Visualize the full flight, gate to gate, in real time.
• Prep all your gear, kneeboard, charts the night before.

Morning of:

• Stick to the routine you wrote down.
• 60–90 seconds of box breathing before you walk into the FBO or the squadron.
• Read your "why I deserve to pass" list one more time.

During the ride:

• One task at a time.
• Use the breathing between tasks.
• When you make a mistake (and you will), release, reset, refocus. Move on inside three seconds.
• Save the analysis for the debrief.

After:

• Whether you pass or bust, debrief honestly. Same structure: what, why, fix.

The Bottom Line

Look. The people who deliver under pressure in any field, the closers, the kickers, the tour-winning golfers, the fighter pilots, none of them were born calm. They built calm. With routines, with breathing, with visualization, with the ability to release a mistake and refocus on the next play. The neuroscience says these tools work because they exploit how arousal, attention, and motor performance interact in the brain.

Aviation is just a more demanding application of the same principles. The cognitive load is higher. The cost of errors is real. The Yerkes-Dodson curve is steeper. And the pilots who manage this best aren't the ones with the best hands. They're the ones who built the mental tools deliberately, the same way they built their crosswind landings: one rep at a time.

Your checkride, whether it's your CFI ride, an instrument or commercial, or anything else, isn't a referendum on your worth as a pilot. It's a performance, on a specific day, of skills you've already demonstrated. You're going to make mistakes during it. They won't matter. What'll matter is whether you can shake them off, breathe, and fly the next minute clean.

You've got this. Truly. Trust your training, trust your routine, and remember: one task, one callout, one trim adjustment at a time.

That's how you fly your checkride.

Blue skies, friend. Go get it.

Sources

• Wickens, C. D., & Hollands, J. G. (2000). Engineering Psychology and Human Performance. Prentice-Hall.
• Stokes, A., & Kite, K. (1994). Flight Stress: Stress, Fatigue, and Performance in Aviation. Ashgate Publishing.
• Yerkes, R. M., & Dodson, J. D. (1908). The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18, 459–482.
• Air & Space Forces Magazine (2023). More Airmen Are Graduating Pilot School Thanks to Mental Toughness Training, covering the U.S. Air Force CRAFT (Comprehensive Readiness for Aircrew Flying Training) program.
• Effects of unexpected event urgency and flight scenario familiarity on pilot trainees' performance and stress responses. NCBI / PMC, 2025.
• Motor expertise modulates cortical activation during imagery of simple and complex actions. PNAS, 2025.
• Brooks, A. W., et al. (2021). Don't stop believing: Rituals improve performance by decreasing anxiety. Meta-analysis of pre-performance rituals (Austria).
• Reporting on pre-performance routines and athlete mental preparation in The Athletic, including interviews with Jason Myers, Trevor Hoffman, Jason Varitek, Aaron Gordon, Collin Morikawa, and references to Rafael Nadal.
• Applied sport psychology literature on attentional refocusing, the Release-Reset-Refocus framework, and mistake recovery.

About the author

Nate Ehlers is the owner of Backseat Pilot and an active airline pilot, C-17 instructor pilot in the Air Force Reserve, and CFI/CFII/MEI/ATP. He has 8,500+ flight hours and was the #1 graduate of his USAF Pilot Training class, earning the AETC Commander's Trophy. Backseat Pilot builds reference materials and training tools for the situations pilots actually run into, created from real cockpit experience, not theory.

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