Reduction in the pilot’s stress during the landing maneuver by providing accurate height information 

conference paper

English

This article is focused on pilot stress reduction during landing by providing accurate height information. This article is based on the results of the completed project TA04030510 – Assistance systems supporting the pilot’s right decisions increasing the safety of operating small civil aircraft. The landing is the most critical phase of a flight. Accidents occurring during approach and landing phases generally represent up to 40 % of all aircraft accidents. A frequent cause of these accidents is a pilot error. During the our project development, 112 accidents of ultralight aircraft and 152 accidents of small GA aircraft that happened from 2005 to 2015 were analyzed. In total, 48 aircraft landing-related accidents and 22 accidents in ultralight aircraft were found. Landing accidents represent 26.5% of all investigated accidents. As a solution to the typical causes of accidents (for instance inability to set the flare altitude correctly etc.), a high-precision indication system was developed within the project. The system is aimed at reducing the pilot's workload and thus decrease the height estimation errors. After the initial flight verification, the system was subjectively evaluated by pilots. The results showed different changes in the perceived pilots stress. Pilots subjectively rated the system worse than expected. Subjective assessments may distort personal attitudes, so another experiment was performed. Monitoring of heart rate variability (HRV) was selected as an effective and practical indicator of pilot stress intensity and as an objective indicator. Commonly available equipment and procedures were used for monitoring of HRV. From a variety of analytical approaches, the Poincare method was subsequently adopted as the most practical and easily applicable. The results indicate that it is possible to measure the HRV in a real flight environment and the results found correspond with the conclusions of other studies. Although only two pilots were tested, a lower level of stress was recorded for both pilots during landing with signaling. Performing an experiment on a real aircraft limited the number of possible participant. A clearer confirmation if HRV could be used as an indicator of stress levels will be possible after examining a statistically significant sample of pilots.

Landing, Stress measurement, Heart rate variability

ŠPLÍCHAL, M.

11. 1. 2019

Brno

978-80-214-5696-9

Research and Education in Aircraft Design 2018

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http://10.13164/conf.read.2018