Appraisal of Several Pilot Control Activity Measures

Abstract

Measures to characterize pilot control activity are of interest for various applications, such as comparing control techniques between pilots, piloting tasks, aircraft configurations, and in ground-based simulator to flight comparisons. In this paper several measures are considered, and two are appraised against the results from previous handling qualities experiments performed in the USAF Total In-Flight Simulator (TIFS) and the NASA Ames Vertical Motion Simulator (VMS). The analysis methods were used to investigate their utility at correlating with trends between the results from the two simulators. The measures investigated were Root Mean Square (RMS) and Power Spectral Density (PSD) of control column activity. Whereas the RMS quantitative results are suitable for statistical analyses associated with large databases, they provide little qualitative information. Conversely, the PSD results provide excellent qualitative information about the pilot’s control activity input power as a function of frequency, but are harder to analyze or summarize when applied to large databases. By calculating the area under the PSD curve in discrete frequency bands, the PSD results can be quantified, and so become suitable for statistical analysis, while retaining frequency content information. In this paper various forms of the PSD results are presented and correlated with the RMS results. The analytical results were also successfully correlated with trends observed in the TIFS and VMS databases.