Heart Period as a Useful Index of Pilot Workload in Commercial Transport Aircraft

As part of a larger study of the validity and reliability of various workload measures for use in aircraft certification, heart period (a function of heart rate) was investigated. In two separate experiments, pilots flew either normal-workload or high-workload missions in a B-727 simulator to determine whether the measures could serve to discriminate between the two workload levels. To test reliability of the measures, the pilots flew the missions again on another day. The results indicate that heart period can serves as an effective supplemental index of aircrew workload in the case of transport aircraft flight deck certification. Furthermore, although sampling artifacts make a strong interpretation tenuous, samples of 30 heartbeats proved sensitive to our workload manipulations and appeared to capture the phasic changes in workload better than did the heart data collected from the entire phase of flight duration.