Quantitative Methodology for Measurement of Pilot Effort in Flight Tests

Resumo

© 2025, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc, AIAA. All rights reserved.Although the measurement of pilot’s effort during flight tasks can use a great amount of different technologies, including robust instrumentation and many qualitative rating scales, until nowadays the pilot’s subjective opinion has great importance in the final decision. During an Air to Air Refueling certification process, where many flight hours was spent and the cost efficiency is of utmost importance, data analysis indicates that pilot workload can be assessed both through subjective scales and the measurement of command displacements. Many issues must be taken into consideration when measuring pilot effort using Helicopter Air-to-Air Refueling: the long flights, sometimes for more than six hours, can influence the pilot’s judgment, and the lack of power margin between both aircraft can influence the actions on commands. A quantitative methodology using the command displacements named P95 was defined and described in the paper published at the AIAA SciTech Conference 2024[1], and some details are reviewed in the present work. As an improvement of the P95 methodology, in this article it was applied to other vehicles, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft performing different tasks, and an analysis of pilot workload was carried out and compared with qualitative degrees of workload. To validate this technique, the trials were done firstly in an engineering flight simulator and after, in real flights. The main objective of this work is to analyze the applicability of the P95 methodology in different aircraft, providing an additional tool to subjective evaluations to identify the workload in flight.