Judith Bürki-Cohen

The Effect of Simulator Motion Cues on Initial Training of Airline Pilots

Two earlier s tudies conducted in the framework of the Federal Aviation Administration/Volpe Flight Simulator Human Factors Program examining the effect of simulator motion on recurrent training and evaluation of airline pilots have found that in the presence of a state -of -the -art visual systems, motion provided by a six -degree -of -freedom platform -motion system only minimally affected evaluation, and did not benefit training, of pilots that were familiar with the airplane. This paper gives preliminary results of a study on the effect of simulator platform motion on initial training of airline pilots that have never flown the simulated airplane.

Transfer of Training from a Full-Flight Simulator vs. a High Level Flight Training Device with a Dynamic Seat

This paper summarizes the most recent study conducted by the Federal Administration Administration/Volpe Center Flight Simulator Fidelity Requirements Program. For many smaller airlines, access to qualified simulators is limited due to the availability of simulators for certain airplanes and the costs of equipment acquisition, leasing, personnel travel, operation, and maintenance. The FAA/Volpe Center Flight Simulator Fidelity Requirements Program has endeavored to address this situation for more than a decade, first examining the most costly aspects of flight simulation in subject-matter-expert workshops and then conducting a series of empirical investigations of the effect of simulator hexapod-platform motion on training effectiveness. This paper is the sequel to the authors 2007 AIAA Modeling-and-Simulation-Technologies Conference paper. In the earlier paper, we provided the scientific, technical, and operational background behind innovative solutions to provide motion cues in the simulator during airline-pilot training. The authors summarized three previous studies by the FAA/Volpe Center investigating the effect of hexapod-platform motion cues on training and evaluation of airline pilots in Full Flight Simulators (FFS). This research did not find operationally relevant differences in performance or behavior of pilots tested in the FFS with motion after having been trained in the same FFS with the motion system turned on or off – despite selection of maneuvers that require motion cues, at least theoretically. It made no difference whether the FFS represented a small turboprop “power house” or a sluggish four-engine jumbo jet, or whether the training in question was initial or recurrent training. Our 2007 paper also described a newly developed simulator, the Full-Flight Trainer FFT-XTM (FFT), able to simulate motion without a hexapod-motion platform. The paper concluded by reporting a proof-of-concept study culminating in the successful type rating of six pilots on a twin-engine turboprop after training in the FFT only. The present paper reports the results of our successor study, comparing the training effectiveness of the FFT, the “motion-cueing simulator without a motion base,” with its FFS equivalent. Not only does this study differ from the earlier studies by comparing FFS motion with an alternative method of motion cueing, but also by including pilots with minimal prior flight experience of fewer than 500 hours. Pilots were divided into two groups to be trained either in the FFS or the FFT on maneuvers determined, from the literature and our previous studies, to be most likely to require platform-motion cues, namely, engine-failures on takeoff and hand-flown engine-out landings with severe weather. Both groups were then tested in the same maneuvers in the FFS with the full-motion platform as a stand-in for the airplane. Results are presented on pilot control-input behavior and flight precision recorded from the simulator. Pilot and instructor opinions regarding the simulator and/or pilot behavior and performance, both after training and after testing, are also reported.

Airplane Upset Prevention Research Needs

This paper provides a broad overview of different efforts to prevent airplanes from entering unusual attitudes via Standard Operating Procedures, different types of training and training tools, and airplane-control-protection and flight-deck technologies. The emphasis will be on providing information that will help determine which research efforts may be most productive in reducing loss of control accidents.

Flight Simulator Motion Literature Pertinent to Airline-Pilot Recurrent Training and Evaluation.

There has been much debate over the years regarding the need for flight simulator motion for airline-pilot training and evaluation. From the intuitive perspective there is the dictum, “The airplane moves, so the simulator must move” – but intuition alone is not enough to make a valid case for requiring elaborate—and costly—motion systems for training and evaluation of airline pilots. The ultimate goal of training and checking—to produce and maintain highly-skilled pilots capable of ensuring a superior level of safety in both normal and abnormal flight operations—cannot be met without adequate resources available to all airlines world-wide. A big part of the motion debate is what resources are adequate—whether the current regulations specifying six-degree-of-freedom Stewart-motion platforms are appropriate or whether the regulations need to be modified; whether advanced-motion-system simulators, which more realistically simulate aircraft motion, are needed; or whether more flexible motion criteria opening the field for alternative motion stimulation would improve universal access to simulator training and thus benefit safety. While there has been much debate, the main issues regarding motion can be broken down into four main facets: 1) how the human perception system responds to airplane motion; 2) the limits of the hexapod-motion systems currently regulated for pilot training in accurately simulating airplane motion; 3) the opinions of aviation experts who experience the issue in the real training environment; and 4) empirical evidence on the necessity of physical motion systems for effective simulator training and checking to ensure transfer between simulator and airplane. This paper brings all of these aspects together by summarizing the literature pertinent to the simulator-motion debate. First, we discuss the extent to which humans’ ability to perceive and appropriately respond to aircraft disturbances depends on visual motion, physical motion, or both. Second, current limitations in flight data availability for certain scenarios, as well as simulator hardware limitations, are discussed. Third, we summarize and respond to the published positions of several stakeholders. Fourth, a range of analytic and empirical work is summarized, from enhanced motion-feedback modeling to pilot-in-the-loop experiments, as well as meta-analytical work on the benefit of motion simulation on transfer of training to the airplane. This includes a synthesis of the Federal Aviation Administration/Volpe Center empirical studies to date.

Vertical Navigation Displays: Pilot performance and workload during simulated constant-angle-of-descent GPS approaches

This study compared the effect of alternative graphic or numeric vertical navigation aircraft cockpit displays on horizontal and vertical flight technical error, workload, and subjective preference. Displays included (a) a moving map with altitude range arc; (b) the same format, supplemented with a push-to-see profile view, including a vector flight-path predictor; (c) an equivalent numeric display; and (d) a numeric nonvertical navigation display. Sixteen pilots each flew 4 different approaches with each format in a Frasca 242 simulator. Our vertical navigation displays reduced vertical flight technical error by as much as a factor of 2 without increasing workload. Relative advantages of the graphics formats are discussed.

Training Value of a Fixed-Base Flight Simulator with a Dynamic Seat

In this paper, we first explain that pilots experience airplane motion via multiple perceptual systems, which makes motion a candidate for simulation via stimulation of only a subset of these systems. Next, we discuss the relative merit of vestibular cues when piloting an airplane. This is followed by a comparison of the vestibular cues received in the airplane and those possible, or practicable, in an airline-pilot training simulator, considering also the history of flight-simulator motion and alternative technologies. We conclude that a vast body of research has shown that accurate cues are not achievable at present, and that those available have not been shown to improve transfer between airplane and simulator. We then examine the cost of motion, and posit that it may prohibit some airline pilots from reaping the benefits of simulator training, with a concomitant loss in passenger safety. This consideration is especially pertinent given the world-wide training needs. Moreover, the equipment, facility, and maintenance costs associated with hexapod-platform motion systems may serve to discourage operators from upgrading the simulator’s fidelity in other important areas, such as assuring that the simulator cockpit does in fact match the equipment in the target aircraft, and that the simulation includes realistic operational representation of the national air space, including the air-traffic-control environment. We describe current and planned research on the training effectiveness of an alternative approach, which provides trainees with visual motion and heave-onset cues in what otherwise corresponds to an FAA Level D Full Flight Simulator in terms of data fidelity. This includes the results of a “proof-of-concept” phase that culminated in the successful type-rating of six pilots on a twin-engine turboprop airplane.

NextGen Flight Deck Data Comm: Auxiliary Synthetic Speech – Phase I

Data Comm—a digital, text-based controller-pilot communication system—is critical to many NextGen improvements. With Data Comm, communication becomes a visual task. Although Data Comm brings many advantages, interacting with a visual display may yield an increase in head-down time, particularly for single-pilot operations. This study examined the feasibility of supplementing the visual Data Comm display with an auxiliary synthetic speech presentation. Thirty-two pilots flew two experimental scenarios in a Cessna 172 Flight Training Device. In one scenario, ATC communication was with a text-only Data Comm display; in the other, the text Data Comm display was supplemented with a synthetic speech display annunciating each message (i.e., text+speech). In both scenarios, pilots heard traffic with similar call signs on the party line and received a conditional clearance; however in just one scenario (counter-balanced between communication conditions), pilots received a clearance that was countermanded by a live controller before it was displayed. Results indicated that relative to the text-only display, the text+speech display aided single-pilot performance by reducing head-down time; and it may have prevented participants from acting prematurely on the conditional clearance. Supplementing text Data Comm with speech did not introduce additional complications: participants were neither more likely to erroneously respond to similar call signs, nor to ignore a live ATC voice countermand. The results suggest that the text+speech display did not hinder single-pilot performance and offered some benefits compared to the text-only display.

Validation of LOC-I Interventions

The basic tenet of this paper is that today’s national airspace systems, at least in advanced industrial countries, qualify as so-called Highly Reliable Systems (HRS). In an HRS, even the type of accident that causes the most fatalities is a rare event. This means that in an HRS, the avoidance of accidents is a frequent event. Therefore, the best way to improve an already highly reliable system would be to learn from the cases where accidents have been avoided. This is not possible, however, because you can’t learn from what is unknown. Instead, safety managers resort to retrospective analyses of the most deadly accidents overall. In an unreliable system, it makes sense to correct what is wrong. In an HRS, however, any mitigation efforts that arise from rare, unpredictable, and often unique events carry great danger to upset the balance of the HRS. Such interventions must be scrupulously vetted, in a series of steps that become increasingly costly as the series progresses. This paper makes some suggestions for these steps. If the anticipated benefit from the intervention is not worth the cost of such a thorough review for unintended consequences, then it may be better to accept the existing high reliability of the system as good enough and leave the system unchanged.

BUSINESS CASE FOR CIVIL AVIATION HUMAN FACTORS

We examined how human factors research and engineering in addressing flight deck and air traffic control issues improves safety and provides tangible cost savings and cost avoidance for Federal Aviation Administration sponsors and industry. The agency spends a limited percentage of its annual budget on research and prioritizes these investments to ensure the best return. This research cuts across a range of human factors considerations spanning selection of applicants for air traffic controller jobs, flight simulator fidelity, generation of scenarios used in pilot training, a new evaluation tool for flight deck certification, design of flight deck operating documents, and design of an air traffic controller information display aid.