Mental Effort and Safety in Curved Approaches

Curved approach procedures are implemented around the world. Although typically flown by the autopilot, human pilots need the situational awareness and skills to take over control in rare-event cases to ensure flight safety. We try to understand the pilot’s cognitive models and differences in required (mental) effort between conventional straight-in approaches and curved approaches. We developed various methods to visualize pilots’ control efforts during manual flight, show their capabilities by comparing various straight-in approach scenarios including good and bad visibility cases, and introduce preliminary results of curved approach experiments. Most experiments were carried out with a few airline pilots and student pilots who had received some elementary flight training in a fixed-base B747-400 simulator. The curved approach experiments were performed in a Dornier Do-228-200 full flight simulator. The main analyses discussed here are based on spectrograms of the pilot’s elevator control, pupil diameter, and electrocardiogram (heart rate and heart rate variability). Results show increased mental effort in bad visibility scenarios, in case of large deviation from the nominal path, and during the flare manoeuvre. They also show how the control style of the airline pilots is more refined than that of the trainees.29th congress of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences (ICAS2014), 7-12 September 2014, St. Petersburg, Russi