Performance assessment in a flight simulator test - Validation of a space psychology methodology

The objective assessment of operator performance in hand controlled docking of a spacecraft on a space station has 30 years of tradition and is well established. In the last years the performance assessment was successfully combined with a psycho-physiological approach for the objective assessment of the levels of physiological arousal and psychological load. These methods are based on statistical reference data. For the enhancement of the statistical power of the evaluation methods, both were actually implemented into a comparable terrestrial task: the flight simulator test of DLR in the selection procedure for ab initio pilot applicants for civil airlines. In the first evaluation study 134 male subjects were analysed. Subjects underwent a flight simulator test including three tasks, which were evaluated by instructors applying well-established and standardised rating scales. The principles of the performance algorithms of the docking training were adapted for the automated flight performance assessment. They are presented here. The increased human errors under instrument flight conditions without visual feedback required a manoeuvre recognition algorithm before calculating the deviation of the flown track from the given task elements. Each manoeuvre had to be evaluated independently of former failures. The expert rated performance showed a highly significant correlation with the automatically calculated performance for each of the three tasks: r(t1)=.883, r(t2)=.874, r(t3)=.872, respectively. An automated algorithm successfully assessed the flight performance. This new method will possibly provide a wide range of other future applications in aviation and space psychology. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.