Objective: The objective was to examine the relationship between cockpit automation use and task-related and task-unrelated thought among airline pilots. Background: Studies find that cockpit automation can sometimes relieve pilots of tedious control tasks and afford them more time to think ahead. Paradoxically, automation has also been shown to lead to lesser awareness. These results prompt th...

The authors studied the effects of marijuana intoxication on the ability of 10 certified airplane pilots to operate a flight simulator. They used a randomized double-blind crossover design to compare the effect of active versus placebo marijuana. They found that all 10 pilots showed a significant decrease in measurements of flying performance 30 minutes after smoking active marijuana. For a gro...

OBJECTIVE The objective was to examine the relationship between cockpit automation use and task-related and task-unrelated thought among airline pilots. BACKGROUND Studies find that cockpit automation can sometimes relieve pilots of tedious control tasks and afford them more time to think ahead. Paradoxically, automation has also been shown to lead to lesser awareness. These results prompt th...

With unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), 36 licensed pilots flew both single-UAV and dual-UAV simulated military missions. Pilots were required to navigate each UAV through a series of mission legs in one of the following three conditions: a baseline condition, an auditory autoalert condition, and an autopilot condition. Pilots were responsible for (a) mission completion, (b) target search, and (c...

In the context of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based systems, pilot based Beamforming (BF) exhibits a high degree of sensitivity to the pilot sub-carriers. Increasing the number of reference pilots significantly improves BF performance as well as system performance. However, this increase comes at the cost of data throughput which inevitably shrinks due to transmission of a...

The effect of expertise on collaborative memory was examined by comparing expert pilots, novice pilots, and non-pilots. Participants were presented with aviation scenarios and asked to recall the scenarios alone or in collaboration with a fellow participant of the same expertise level. Performance in the collaborative condition was compared to nominal group conditions (i.e., pooled individual p...

Among the many occupational hazards to which Army rotary-wing aviators are exposed is intense noise generated from the aircraft. The potential for permanent hearing loss and difficulty communicating in helicopter noise is well known; an appropriate way to evaluate a hearing-impaired pilot’s safety risk due to hearing loss is not as well known. Previous research has studied communication ability...

Neck injury is an unquantified clinical and epidemiological problem in pilots exposed to high G forces. The description and assessment of potential deleterious effects on the cervical vertebrae are important aspects of occupational preventive aerospace medicine. This report presents the findings from a prevalence study of acute neck injury, resulting from high G forces, in pilots of high perfor...

External aids are required to increase safety and performance during the manual control of an aircraft. Automated systems allow to surpass the performance usually achieved by pilots. However, they suffer from several issues caused by pilot unawareness of the control command from the automation. Haptic aids can overcome these issues by showing their control command through forces on the control ...

We describe three applications of an attention-situation awareness model to predicting pilot performance in high fidelity flight simulations. The model incorporates the SEEV model of selective attention, in which eye movements are driven by salience, expectancy and value, and are inhibited by the effort required to move the eyes over longer distance and of concurrent tasks. In application 1, we...