Pilot Performance: Assessing How Scan Patterns & Navigational Assessments Vary by Flight Expertise

YANG JH, KENNEDY Q, SULLIVAN J, FRICKER Jr RD. Pilot performance: assessing how scan patterns & navigational assessments vary by flight expertise. Aviat Space Environ Med 2013; 84:116-24. Introduction: Helicopter overland navigation is a cognitively complex task that requires continuous monitoring of system and environmental parameters and many hours of training to master. This study investigated the effect of expertise on pilots' gaze measurements, navigation accuracy, and subjective assessment of their navigation accuracy in overland navigation on easy and difficult routes. Methods: A simulated overland task was completed by 12 military officers who ranged in flight experience as measured by total flight hours (TFH). They first studied a map of a route that included both easy and difficult route sections, and then had to 'fly' this simulated route in a fixed-base helicopter simulator. They also completed pre-task estimations and post-task assessments of the navigational difficulty of the transit to each waypoint in the route. Their scan pattern was tracked via eye tracking systems, which captured both the subject's out-the-window (OTW) and topographical map scan data. Results: TFH was not associated with navigation accuracy or root mean square (RMS) error for any route section. For the easy routes, experts spent less time scanning out the window (rho = -0.61) and had shorter OTW dwell (rho = -0.66). For the difficult routes, experts appeared to slow down their scan by spending as much time scanning out the window as the novices while also having fewer Map fixations (rho = -0.65) and shorter OTW dwell (rho = -0.69). However, TFH was not significantly correlated with more accurate estimates of route difficulty. Discussion: This study found that TFH did not predict navigation accuracy or subjective assessment, but was correlated with some gaze parameters.