Improving professional pilots' visual scanning and manual flight performance through training on skilled eye gaze strategies

Poor cockpit monitoring has been identified as an important contributor to aviation accidents. Improving pilots’ monitoring strategies could therefore help to enhance flight safety. We analyzed flight performance and eye movements of professional airline pilots in a full flight simulator. In a pre-training session, 20 pilots performed a manual approach scenario as pilot flying (PFs) and were classified as one of three performance profiles: unstabilized, standard, and most accurate. Fourteen pilots came back for a post-training session and performed a similar approach. Seven of them, the experimental group, received feedback on their own performance (i.e., during the pre-training session) and an eye tracking video showing efficient visual scanning strategies from one of the most accurate pilots. The seven others, the control group, received general guidelines on cockpit monitoring. During the pre-training session, the unstabilized pilots either under- or over-focused various instruments. Their number of visual scanning patterns was lower than those of pilots who manage to stabilize their approach. The most accurate pilots showed a higher perceptual efficiency with shorter fixation times and more fixations on important primary flight instruments. During the post-training session, the experimental group improved its flight performance (compared to the control group) and its visual scanning strategies became more similar to that of the most accurate pilots. In summary, our results showed that cockpit monitoring largely underlies manual flight performance and suggest that it can be improved using a training program mainly based on exposure to eye movement examples from highly accurate pilots.