Captain Reyné O'Shaughnessy

Founder, Piloting 2 Wellbeing

Captain Reyné O’Shaughnessy served as a commercial airline pilot for over 34 years for a Fortune 50 company and has logged over 10,000 of total heavy jet time in aircrafts Boeing B747, 767/757, 727, and Airbus 300/310. Notably, thirty-four years ago Reyné was one of the first women Boeing 747 qualified.

Captain Reyne is the founder of Piloting 2 Wellbeing and recently co-found Aviation Health and Wellbeing Institute. Both organizations are founded on the premise that focus on providing a new vision of aviation safety, performance, and learning.

Captain O has over a decade of experience as a wellbeing strategist with a particular focus on mindfulness-based training. She is a visionary leader who brings a clear idea of how the future of mental health and performance in aviation should look.

Her mission is to help pilots and aviation students navigate the regulated system of aviation to keep them flying healthy and her key focus is working on ensuring that aviation professionals know how to become resilient with a focus on wellbeing.

She has earned a teacher certification from Brown University in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) in addition to a BS (Phi Kappa Phi) in leadership and an Executive Certificate in Business from UC BS in Leadership Berkeley. She is a certified health coach graduate from the accredited Functional Medicine Coaching Academy (FMC).

Having traveled the globe repeatedly, Reyné’s favorite place in the world is with her family, spending time on the east and west coast of the US. She enjoys gardening, meditation, and the love of learning.

Training for the Next Generation - Resiliency

Aircraft pilots and cabin crew function in highly complex, safety-critical environments that demand high cognitive and physical performance. This requires pilots and cabin crew to maintain adequate physical and mental wellbeing. [The topic of wellbeing in aviation is growing due to (1) evolving data demonstrating its role in performance, (2) increasing relevance following the effects of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic on wellbeing and mental health, and (3) factors such as burnout and retention rates.] However, while the importance of mental health and wellbeing is becoming increasingly clear, many airline training programs lack formal wellbeing and mental health curriculum, i.e. non-technical skills (NTS).

To fill this gap, we propose a performance-centered mental health and wellbeing curriculum catering to aircrews. The curriculum includes four virtual modules designed to complement an established technical flight training program: (1) fundamentals of sleep, (2) nutrition for wellness and performance, (3) exercise science for aviation professionals and (4) mindfulness tailored for aviators.

The importance of wellbeing aviators and cabin crew is becoming increasingly clear for a performance-centered mental health curriculum. The aim is to provide critical tools to build and maintain their wellbeing through their aviation career. It is hypothesized that building of wellbeing skills can positively improve operational safety and efficiency by expanding the skill sets.