Experimental analysis of flight performance under workload variations

Abstract

© 31st Congress of the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, ICAS 2018. All rights reserved.A great amount of aeronautical accidents and incidents in the last decades are associated with human causes, which can be related not only to the human itself, but with the human machine interface associated to a piloting task. This work presents a preliminary experiment that aims at analysing how a set of different tasks increases the workload of the pilot and how pilot's performance is affected by the increasing workload under different flight conditions (normal and abnormal). The experimental procedure considers 3 pilots executing a take-off and stabilization mission, where a group of tasks, based on the MATB-II approach, are systematically presented to the pilot. Variables such as altitude, heading, rate of climb and yaw rate, are measured. The results show that the variables measured near the pilot input command are more affected by the different levels of workload.

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