The Effects of Expertise on Airline PILOT’S Eye Activities in Flight Tasks with Different Complexity

Information processing remains one of the key elements of aviation safety, and eye is the most essential sensory organ as it almost processed 80% of flight information. In order to improve the operating efficiency and safety level of airlines, the impacts of expertise on the qualified civilian airmen’s eyes activities is still needed to be studied, especially under multiple flight scenarios with different complexity. Three types of eye movement parameters, including eye blinks rate, pupil size and dwell time were compared in three different flight tasks. Besides, fourteen pilots with airlines background were classified into two groups depending on their flight hours. This experiment was carried out in a CRJ-200 full flight simulator. The factor of task complexity indicated significant effects on eye blinks rate (F(2, 12) = 17.833, p < 0.001), and dwell time (F(2, 12) = 17.317, p < 0.001), and expertise showed a significant influence on dwell time (F(1, 18) = 8.532, p = 0.006). Furthermore, neither of the factor had effect on pupil size. Although expertise seemed no effect on commercial airline pilots in routine tasks, the phenomenon of difference existed when encountering unusual surroundings or situations of aircraft. Unlike the irregular fluctuation of pupil size, and eye blinks rate that only presented difference in most sophisticated tasks, dwell time could be an ideal indicator to distinguish less expert and more expert in whatever the complexity of the tasks.