Monitoring pilot "Situation Awareness"

Pilot error remains the major cause of aircraft accidents. The lack of Situation Awareness SA, even amongst experienced pilots, is one of the primary reasons for pilot error. It is important to ensure that pilots are able to maintain a high level of SA before they act as members of a flight crew. A pilot's SA can be assessed by monitoring pilot behavior using observations of pilot eye movement. In this paper we discuss a rule-based approach to assess novice pilots' SA against a baseline. A recent experiment confirmed there is a measurable difference between the eye movement of an experienced pilot and the eye movement of several novice pilots. Initially, an expert pilot's eye movement was recorded using an eye tracker device in order to set the baseline. A Gaze Analyzer was used to derive relevant information from eye movement data. After consulting a Subject Matter Expert SME, a rule-based system was created to monitor the pilot's behavior. The data was analyzed to identify behavioral patterns in order to associate the pilots' level of SA with their mode of attention distribution fixation. Novice pilot's eye movement data was compared with an expert pilot's eye movement data using an inference engine.