Objective evaluation of hand-flying skills and styles in the final approach

The dynamics of human pilot control have been studied extensively from a control engineering point of view, but surprisingly little from a human pilot training and evaluation perspective. In this paper we introduce a number of interesting findings relating to the hand-flying skills of student trainees and professional pilots. For this study we focus on landing approaches in a fixed base Boeing 747 simulator. The slow response of this large aircraft requires specific manual control skills, which may remain unnoticed in subjective and flight-path based evaluations. Spectrograms of the elevator control inputs made by the (trainee) pilot show to be a powerful way to visualise general skill differences. We also identified and analysed interesting time-domain characteristics, such as pulsive control styles including half-stepped and reverse (doublet) control, where a sharp, large control input is immediately followed by a smaller or reversed input.The 2015 Asia-Pacific International Symposium on Aerospace Technology (APISAT2015), Cairns, Australia, 25-27 Nov 201