No abstract

Long-haul crews have to be supported in a timely manner by adequate training tailored to address manual skills or by operational provisions like mixed-fleet flying or more frequent transitions between short-haul and long-haul operation.

This paper reports an experimental study with the objective to assess pilots' raw-data-based flight performance which is affected by long-term practice and structured training. Fifty-seven airline pilots with different levels of aviation experience scheduled on an Airbus fleet, representing contrary levels of practice and training, had to fly a simulated 45 minutes approach and landing scenario while flight performance data were objectively recorded. The level of practice and training was found to have a significant influence on manual flying skills. Pilots with low levels of practice and training showed a large variance in manual flight performance; pilots with high levels of practice and training demonstrated high and homogenous performance.

This paper describes an experimental study investigating pilots' manual flying skills. In today's line oriented flight training, basic flying skills are neglected frequently. So, the study examines the manual flying skills of commercial airline pilots under the influence of several performance shaping factors like training, practice or fatigue in a landing scenario. The landing phase shows a disproportionate high percentage of aircraft accidents and it is typically flown by hand. The study is to be undertaken with randomly selected pilots in a full motion flight simulator to ensure a high validity of the results.

The aim of this study was to analyze pilots' visual scanning under conditions visually restricted by the occlusion paradigm. During manual flight, pilots experienced interruptions in their panel scan due to concurring tasks and monitoring of distant displays. Eleven volunteer airline pilots performed several manual instrument landing system approaches in a fixed-base flight simulator. Some of these approaches were performed using the paradigm of occlusion with shutter glasses. Under occlusion, the gaze pattern analysis revealed that pilots demonstrated reduced mean glance durations, but did not reduce their attention to lesser information displays. The results also indicated that the attitude indicator (artificial horizon) as a preview instrument was less affected by occlusion compared to other areas of interest. A subsequent scanpath analysis revealed that vertical tracking was the predominant information acquisition strategy and corresponded to larger deviations on the glideslope. These results imply the need to optimize information even for short glances, and to be very cautious with adaptive layouts of free programmable or dynamic displays, and not to overburden the pilot flying with parallel tasks.