ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief history of the field of crisis intervention and explains how crisis intervention services entered into and influenced aviation. It discusses that there are too many airlines and too wide a range of aviation services including air traffic control systems in the world to cover completely their involvement in critical incident stress management. The Federal Aviation Administration took punitive action against stressed pilots and rescinded their license to fly. Military aviation, however, entered the critical incident stress management (CISM) picture in a significant manner just before the start of the Persian Gulf War in 1990. Many of them attended training programs provided by the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation (ICISF) in various parts of the United States. Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) facilitated a significant flow of information to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regarding the development of critical incident response programs for airlines.
