Investigation into Pilot Perception and Control During Decrab Maneuvers in Simulated Flight

An experiment was conducted in the SIMONA Research Simulator to investigate the influence of sway, roll and yaw motion cues on pilot performance, control and motion perception during decrab maneuvers. In the experiment, six pilots were instructed to perform manual decrab maneuvers in heavy crosswind conditions with a Cessna Citation 500 model. The contributions of yaw, roll and sway motion stimuli were varied independently, such that their individual effects on objective measures and subjective ratings could be examined. The results of this experiment show that yaw motion had a positive influence on touchdown performance in terms of lateral position with respect to the runway centerline. Roll motion significantly decreased roll rate variations during decrab, which indicates its importance in aircraft handling. High workload and the relatively low intensity of lateral motion cues led to the fact that pilots were unable to give consistent fidelity ratings. This emphasizes the need for an objective and quantifiable method to determine motion fidelity for such maneuvers. Pilot models can possibly be used to investigate the influence of different motion cues in these transient control tasks and it is hoped the results and lessons learned in this experiment can contribute to this future work.

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