Gaze Movements of Helicopter Pilots during real and simulated Take-Off and Landing Maneuvers

Abstract

Most accidents and serious incidents of commercial air transport helicopters occur during standard flight phases, whereby a main cause are pilots' situational awareness. Enabling pilots to better assess their situational awareness can make an important contribution in reducing the risk of fatal accidents. One approach is to examine pilot's gaze behavior with the help of eye tracking. This paper reports the results of eye tracking measurement during real flight and simulator studies of a standard mission profile. The general gaze behavior is characterized by a dominant, external view and the airspeed and altitude indicator as the most important flight instruments. A real-world applicability of gaze data obtained in the simulator could be shown.

Gaze Movements of Helicopter Pilots during Real and Simulated Take-Off and Landing Maneuvers

“…The authors recommend extending the database with different standard maneuvers and a replication of real helicopter flights in a simulator environment to investigate a real-world applicability of earlier simulator studies [9,10,12]. This paper, which has already been presented in a similar form in [17], presents the results of eye tracking measurements during real and simulated flight tests based on a standard mission profile. The aim of this case study is to provide initial approaches to describe the general gaze behavior of helicopter pilots during standard flight phases.…”