Eye tracking of pilots during approach and landing on unprepared and prepared runways
Date
2018
Authors
Inkley, Jadine
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Abstract
There are more airfields in South Africa that have unprepared runways than prepared runways and therefore pilots and airlines operated in South Africa would benefit from aircraft being designed to land on both runway types. Therefore, the purpose of this report was to determine whether there was a difference between eye movements of pilots during approach and landing on prepared and unprepared runways, to understand if cockpit layout should change to best suit landing capabilities. A study was conducted in the Embraer ERJ-145 flight simulator with 10 certified airline pilots. The pilots wore eye tracking glasses while completing their training sessions. The eye tracking data was recorded during the approach and landings of these sessions and the data was analysed using SMI BeGaze™ software. These results were exported to Microsoft Excel™ and GraphPad Prism™ to complete statistical analysis. The results showed that the Primary Function Display (PFD) was the most favoured Area of Interest (AOI) by the pilots. The mean dwell time, percentage dwell time and fixation count were all highest in the PFD. The differences between the prepared and unprepared runway approaches and landings were minimal for mean dwell time, percentage dwell time and fixation count, however, the fixation rate increased for all AOIs during unprepared runway approaches and landings. Also, the transition between AOI’s showed that a pilot increased number of transitions between the windscreen (OUT) and the PFD during unprepared runway landings. It was concluded that the mean dwell time, percentage dwell time and fixation count had minimal changes when landing on an unprepared runway. However, pilots tended to have a higher fixation rate when coming in to land on unprepared runways. This meant that the pilots needed more time to process the data on the instruments when flying an unfamiliar scenario (such as the unprepared runway landing). The number of transitions between the PFD and Outside (OUT) AOIs led to the recommendation that aircraft that are designed to land on both runway types should include a Heads-Up Display (HUD) to reduce pilot workload by projecting the PFD on the windscreen
Description
A research report submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Science in Engineering to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2018
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Citation
Inkley, Jadine (2018) Eye tracking of pilots during approach and landing on unprepared and prepared runway, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, https://hdl.handle.net/10539/27707