The Cambridge Cockpit and the Paradoxes of Fatigue, 1940-1977

The story of a unique and controversial wartime study of pilot fatigue.

During World War II, members of the Cambridge Psychology Laboratory were commissioned to study pilot fatigue. They set up a Spitfire cockpit in the laboratory, turned it into a piece of laboratory apparatus, and carried out a series of important experiments that appeared to dramatically confirm the dangers of fatigue. Historians of psychology are aware of this episode, but the experiments, the events surrounding them, and the scientific reasoning involved have never been studied in detail. By going into the episode in depth, and by looking behind the scenes at archival material, David Bloor offers an analysis that is both original and more penetrating than anything that has been said before on the topic.

Bloor describes the Cockpit experiments themselves before turning to the theoretical interpretation of the results and the intellectual resources that informed how they were viewed. Bloor then explains a major empirical and theoretical challenge to the Cambridge Cockpit work drawn from a field study of landing accidents apparently showing that fatigue-effects were operationally negligible. Bloor delves into the consequences of this challenge, and the Cambridge reaction to it, in the post-war years. The analysis is deepened by comparison with the corresponding wartime work on fatigue carried out both in Germany and the United States. As the author demonstrates, even today the Cambridge Cockpit experiments pose a challenge to the current understanding of pilot fatigue.

David Bloor is professor emeritus in the sociology of science at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Enigma of the Aerofoil: Rival Theories in Aerodynamics, 1909-1930 and Knowledge and Social Imagery and the coauthor of Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis, all published by the University of Chicago Press.