The instructor assistant system (iASSYST) - utilizing eye tracking for commercial aviation training purposes

Abstract

This work investigates the potential of providing commercial aviation flight instructors with an eye tracking enhanced observation system to support the training process. During training, instructors must deal with many parallel tasks, such as operating the flight simulator, acting as air traffic controllers, observing the pilots and taking notes. This can cause instructors to miss relevant information that is crucial for debriefing the pilots. To support instructors, the instructor ASsistant SYSTem (iASSYST) was developed. It includes video, audio, simulator and eye tracking recordings. iASSYST was evaluated in a study involving 7 instructors. The results show that with iASSYST, instructors were able to support their observations of errors, find new errors, determine that some previously identified errors were not errors, and to reclassify the types of errors that they had originally identified. Instructors agreed that eye tracking can help identifying causes of pilot error.

Practitioner summary: This paper introduces an instructor assistant system, which is evaluated in a user study involving 7 airline flight instructors. The system can be used by airline flight instructors to complement their observations, as a basis for discussions with pilots during debriefing, and by airline pilots to improve their flight performance.

Keywords:

• Aviation
• training
• eye tracking
• user study

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgments

We thank Professor Robert Mauro from the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon for his helpful insights and additions in preparing this work and writing the paper. We thank Benedikt Wagner and Michel Kölla, as well as Captain Christoph Ammann from Swiss International Air Lines Ltd. for their support throughout the design and execution of our study. Furthermore, we thank Fabian Mangold from Lufthansa Aviation Training Switzerland AG for his technical support. Finally, we thank all our participants and Swiss International Air Lines Ltd. for their collaboration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study was partially funded by the Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA) Switzerland under the grant number [2014-142].