The research of eye movement behavior of expert and novice in flight simulation of landing

Abstract

The objective of this research is to study the eye movement patterns of pilots in landing process by analyzing and comparing the eye movement data of experts and novices so as to reveal their cognitive process of information processing in the final landing stage. Ten experts who have flown above 1000 h and fourteen novices whose flight hours were between 200 to 400 participated the experiment. All subjects’ task was to implement a landing task according visual flight rules in no wind and shinning day and the landing task was completed with a high fidelity flight simulator. Eye movement data and flight parameters data were recorded during the experiment. The result showed that there was obvious difference of flight performance between experts and novices. The course deviation, roll angel and pitch angel of experts were better compared to that of novices. And the land course of experts was also better than that of novices. It could be found by the comparison of eye movement index between experts and novices that there were obvious differences of six eye movement index. Expert showed shorter fixation time, smaller pupil size changes, lager scanning range, faster scan velocity, greater scan frequency and greater fixation frequency. So the conclusion can be made that there is obvious differences between experts and novices not only in flight performance but also in eye movement pattern; the scanning pattern is related to flight performance and effective scanning pattern is related to better flight performance; so the measurement of eye movement pattern can be used to evaluate and forecast flight performance and thus to guide the training.