Experimental Study On Pilots Behavioural Characteristic Of High Elevation Airport Terminal Area

The flight safety in high elevation airport terminal area is not only a worldwideproblem, but also a unique subject to CAAC, it has become one of the most great focusedon and major issues to be solved for CAAC in recent years. Current researches are mainlyfocused on cognitive ability and behavioral changes of the ordinary people in hypoxiaenvironment, while such special study of the pilots has not been reported. This research is asub-project of“Safety Theory and Key Technology Research on Plateau Airport TerminalArea Flight”(Approval No.: 60832012), which is the national natural science funds subjectand civil aviation mutual fund funded key project, it is designed to study the influence ofhypoxic environment and complex task conditions on both cognitive ability, eye-movementcharacteristics and operation performance of civil aviation pilots. This topic can provide anexperimental basis for a further exploration on incentives of adverse human-machinecoupling trigger mechanism and the revision of V1/VRspeed in high elevation airportterminal area, it can also promote the plateau complex airport environment Flight TechnicalError (FTE) assessment.This experiment was divided into three sub-experiments: the pilot cognitiveexperiment under the plateau airport hypoxia environment, the eye-movementcharacteristics experiment and the flight performance experiment in the plateau airportterminal area. The pilot cognitive experiment was designed by a single factor (hypoxia level)matching experimental design method; the flight performance experiment and theeye-movement characteristics experiment were designed by a 3(environmental complexity:general, middle, high)×2(task difficulty: general, high) factors matching experimentaldesign method.65 civil aviation student pilots with 230 hours of flight training experience wereselected random, and a high-performance hypobaric chamber to simulate three typicalplateau airports hypoxic environment was used in the experiment. By using theself-preparation cognitive test software, PCATD flight training device and two T120-typeTobii non-contact eye-movement instruments, three sub-experiments had been carried out inthis study. After the excluding of abnormal data, this topic conducted paired samples T- test, repeated measures ANOVA test, two-factor multivariate ANOVA test and correlationanalysis on the valid data, and got the following conclusions: 1, the hypoxic environment ofplateau airport had significant damaging effects on pilot cognitive ability, and withincreasing altitude, the pilot reaction time and error rates increased; 2, the average fixationduration of pilot on important instruments became longer as the plateau airport terminalarea altitude got higher; and the difficulty for pilot to divert his attention from inside cockpitto outside cockpit became greater as the difficulty of flight task increased ; 3, the damagingextent of pilot performance got worse as the complexity of plateau airport environment andthe difficulty of flight task became higher. Based on these experimental results, the authorfinally constructed a pilot cognitive ability and flight performance prediction model by theStructural Equation Model theory in the plateau airport terminal area，so as to provide atheory support for pilot selection and training in plateau airport terminal area.