The evaluation of military pilot's attention distributions on the flight deck

A total of 35 pilots participated in the current research by performing an air-to-surface task using an eye-tracker and F-16 flight simulator. All participants were qualified military pilots with mission-ready qualifications in tactical operations. The age of participants was between 26 and 45 years (M = 33.43, SD = 5.64). The total flying hours were between 372 hours and 3,200 hours (M = 1302.71, SD = 839.42). The results show that the pilots distributed most of their gaze-points and fixations on HUD rather than OC, ICP, LMFD and RMFD. Pilots' fixations were mainly focused on HUD (70.29%) and OC (28.47%) and there were only 0.96%, 0.28% and 0.08% of fixations on ICP, LMFD and RMFD respectively. The findings not only underline the strategies of training to prevent controlled flight into terrain during tactical maneuvers, but also assist system designers in understanding pilot's attention distributions to facilitate Human-Centered design of flight decks.

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