Abstract
Poor cockpit monitoring has been identified as an important contributor to aviation accidents. Improving pilots’ monitoring strategies could therefore help to enhance flight safety. During two different sessions, we analyzed the flight performance and eye movements of professional airline pilots in a full-flight simulator. In a pre-training session, 20 pilots performed a manual approach scenario as pilot flying (PFs) and were classified into three groups according to their flight performance: unstabilized, standard, and most accurate. The unstabilized pilots either under- or over-focused various instruments. Their number of visual scanning patterns was lower than those of pilots who managed to stabilize their approach. The most accurate pilots showed a higher perceptual efficiency with shorter fixation times and more fixations on important primary flight instruments. Approximately 10 months later, fourteen pilots returned for a post-training session. They received a short training program and performed a similar manual approach as during the pre-training session. Seven of them, the experimental group, received individual feedback on their own performance and visual behavior (i.e., during the pre-training session) and a variety of data obtained from the most accurate pilots, including an eye-tracking video showing efficient visual scanning strategies from one of the most accurate pilots. The other seven, the control group, received general guidelines on cockpit monitoring. During the post-training session, the experimental group had better flight performance (compared to the control group), and its visual scanning strategies became more similar to those of the most accurate pilots. In summary, our results suggest that cockpit monitoring underlies manual flight performance and that it can be improved using a training program based mainly on exposure to eye movement examples from highly accurate pilots.
Highlights
Since the pre-training session included two sub-samples with too few pilots to perform inferential statistics, we report the descriptive analyses only
Individual eye-tracking data of the posttraining session are presented in Supplementary Material in Table S4, Table S5, Table S6
We showed in this study that sub-optimal monitoring of flight instruments was associated with lower flight performance
Summary
Visual scanning is a necessary choreography that aims at monitoring the state of the different systems and maneuvering the aircraft toward the desired attitudes. The instruments (e.g., attitude indicator, speed, altimeter, and engine parameters) and the external environment (by clear weather) must be frequently monitored in order to build and maintain up-to-date situational awareness. Performing efficient visual scanning is complex, and the issue of improper monitoring in the cockpit is not new: it was identified by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) as being involved in 84% of major accidents in the United States from 1978 to 1990 [1]. Since the NTSB study period (1978–1990), 17 new accidents involving monitoring problems were identified in
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