Modelling Visual Attention for Future Intelligent Flight Deck - A Case Study of Pilot Eye Tracking in Simulated Flight Takeoff

Piloting is a cognitively demanding task that not only requires conceptual knowledge and domain expertise, but also skills to intercept relevant visual cues in a changing environment. Pilots’ abilities to divide their visual attention effectively during critical flight maneuvers play a central role in their situation awareness and decision-making. Given that a large number of visual cues in the flight deck need to be processed by the human eyes, there is an opportunity to utilize eye tracking in the analytics of pilot performance. To this end, we present a case study involving 10 licensed pilots in a simulated flight takeoff scenario and demonstrate that specific gaze behaviors employed by a pilot may lead to varying levels of success. In particular, pilots who perform better during the climb phase may often exhibit faster visual searches, and those who perform better during the takeoff phase may often scan a larger area of the visual scene. Also, more successful pilots tend to report lower cognitive workload that is further supported by their pupil diameters in the experiment. This knowledge may be utilized in the development of user models to infer pilot success and failure, whereby an intelligent flight deck can adapt system behaviors to the pilot, whereby alerts, warnings, and automation may be initiated in the event of detecting irregularity in pilots’ gaze.