title: Joint Committee on Aviation Pathology: XVIII. Correlation of occurrence of aircraft accidents with biorhythmic criticality and cycle phase in U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, and civil aviation pilots.
abstract: The correlation of occurrence of aircraft accidents to critical and negative phases of the biorhythm cycles was investigated. Data from 880 U.S. Air Force pilot-involved accident cases were studied and added to 4,279 previously reported cases. The data were tested by chi-square analysis under the null hypothesis that there is no effect of biorhythm on aviation accidents. Under this hypothesis, the expected number of accidents occurring on critical days should be 179.13 for the U.S. Air Force; there were 179. In analyzing the effect of biorhythmic criticality for pilot-involved cases from all sources, there were were 300 individual chi-square values computed. The frequency of these values by their percentile distribution so closely matched the theoretical distribution that there was no evidence whatsoever to indicate an effect of biorhythmic criticality. There no correlation between multiply negative or individually negative phases of the biorhythm cycles and aircraft accidents in the U.S. Air Force or in the combined pilot-involved accident group.
mesh_terms: D000060:Accidents, Aviation; D000337:Aerospace Medicine; D001683:Biological Clocks; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008887:Military Medicine; D014481:United States