Gaze Movements of Helicopter Pilots during Hover Flight at different Altitudes

Abstract

The knowledge of pilots’ gaze behaviour could be used to investigate and improve pilot assistance systems like e.g. head-mounted displays or tactile cueing. This paper reports the first known real world helicopter application of eye tracking and focuses on hovering in different altitudes. Also a new hybrid data acquisitionsetup was realized to get a complete flight dynamics state trajectory of the flight tests. The results show a strong individual gaze behaviour of the pilots. Nevertheless, it is possible to allocate appropriate and inappropriate gaze movement strategies by connecting the recorded gaze movements and the flight test data. Furthermore, a correlation between the gaze movements and the flight experience was found.