Morbidity experience of air traffic control personnel--1967--77

The morbidity experience of 28,086 air traffic controllers has been examined from 1967--77 with particular emphasis to the potential effects of job demands on ATC health. The morbidity experience of air traffic controllers does not appear excessive, except for psychoneurotic disorders, compared with the experience of other outside groups studied. Additionally, a lack of association between disease occurrence and occupation is observed in the data correlating disease occurrence with length of service and age. While some isolated trends found in these data are supportive of an occupation/disease relationship, they are neither--as would be expected if the association were a strong one--impressive nor consistent. Although anticipated empirically, one of the more interesting results of the study was quantification of the substantial differences found to exist in the incidence of disease before and after the second-career legislation.