In-Flight Evaluation of Pilot Gaze Patterns During Ship Deck Landings

Abstract

The Ship Deck Landing (SDL) is one of the most challenging missions for helicopter pilots. Adverse weather conditions with a small and constantly moving deck platform as well as turbulence and an obstacle environment makes the SDL a demanding task. Therefore, it requires a lot of training to not compromise flight safety. As the training in a real environment is expensive, requires a lot of organizational effort and is restricted in emergency procedures, a simulator with realistic cues could be a solution to optimize the SDL training. In this work the use of eye tracking is proposed to find out the correct visual cues, which are necessary for a realistic training simulation environment of the SDL. A training campaign with 17 SDLs was recorded and analyzed using logging devices and eye tracking glasses. The results show that eye tracking can be a suitable tool to find significant visual cues for the SDL task. Multiple outside and cockpit visual cues and differences in gaze behavior between approach and takeoff were identified.