Eye tracking in a helicopter: Getting insights into helicopter pilots’ human-machine interaction

Abstract

Most accidents and serious incidents of commercial air transport helicopters occur during standard flight phases, whereby a main cause are pilots’ situational awareness. Enabling pilots to better assess their situational awareness can make an important contribution in reducing the risk of fatal accidents. One approach is to examine pilot’s gaze behavior with the help of eye tracking. This paper reports the results of eye tracking measurement during real flight and simulator studies of a standard mission profile. The general gaze behavior is characterized by a dominant, external view and the airspeed and altitude indicator as the most important flight instruments. A real-world applicability of gaze data obtained in the simulator could be shown.