Joint Test Project Report of Combat Air Support Target Acquisition Program. SEEKVAL. Project IA2. Direct Visual Imagery Experiments.

Abstract : A series of four experiments were conducted in the course of developing a suitable method for measuring the effects of target/background characteristics on visually unaided target acquisition performance under varying flight operations. In the Dynamic Imagery Study, 72 military aircrews searched for 24 small tactical targets (distributed over 6 missions) under various combinations of simulated airspeed, briefing levels and inflight target cueing, by 'flying' a fixed based, motion-picture based simulator. Results showed marked performance improvement due to briefing levels (photos vs no photos) and relatively less improvement with Forward-Air-Controller cueing, and reduction of airspeed from 360 kts to 220 kts. In the complexity study different aircrews judged the relative search-scene difficulty of the 24 target encounters. In the Ambiguity study another set of aircrews counted the number of 'cues and target-like' elements in the search scenes. The Static Detection study evaluated target acquisition performance under the condition were flight dynamics are eliminated. Results from all four studies were subjected tp regression analytic techniques using 10 predictors for estimating the performance under the various experimental conditions. Multiple correlations ranged from 0.77 to 0.99. Maximum available range (MAR), a composite measure of all ground scene, flight-related, and simulator characteristics which establishes a limiting observer-target range for meaningful acquisition, proved to be the most powerful performance predictor.