Flying Performance on the Advanced Simulator for Pilot Training and Laboratory Tests of Vision

Simulator flying performance was compared with the results of sensory visual tests for student pilots, instructor pilots, and fighter pilots, and aircraft flying grades were compared for student pilots. Simulator tasks were formation flight, low-level flight, bombing, and restricted-visibility landing; visual tests were super-threshold velocity discrimination of a radially expanding flow pattern, manual tracking of both motion in depth and motion in the frontal plane, motion thresholds and contrast thresholds for a moving square, and a static sinewave grating. Landing and formation-flight performance correlated with both manual tracking and expanding flow pattern test results. Pilots who were better able to discriminate different rates of expansion of the test flow pattern achieved a greater percentage of hits and near misses in the low-level flight and bombing task. Aircraft flying grades for student pilots correlated with expanding flow pattern test results and with manual tracking of motion in depth. These findings suggest that tests of visual sensitivity to super-threshold motion might usefully be added to current selection tests for flying personnel. They also emphasize the importance of accurate, artifact-free representation of motion in simulator visual displays.