Visual dominance in pilots during recovery from upset

We conducted an unusual attitude recovery flight test in an instrumented L-29 fighter jet trainer owned by the Operator Performance Laboratory (OPL) using commercial airline first-officer participants who had not yet achieved the rank of captain on any aircraft, who had no military flight training background, and who have not had any acrobatic training in the flight background. Two test spirals were conducted with 15 participants serving in Spiral 1 and 12 participants serving in Spiral 2. Spiral 1 was a screening study and is not discussed in this paper. We investigated if Synthetic Vision Systems (SVS) could enhance the pilot's ability to recognize and recover from unusual attitude (uA) conditions compared to present-day Electronic Flight Information Systems (EFIS). Additionally, we investigated the effect of display field of view (FOV, 12 degrees and 30 degrees) and if recoveries with SVS over open water caused any problems in the recognition of the aircraft attitude. The evaluation pilot (EP) participants were seated in the rear crew station of the L-29 which had electronic displays that showed the test symbology. The canopy had a view limiting device which eliminated any and all view to the outside world. Carefully designed unusual attitude entry conditions were developed for this flight test and administered by the safety pilot (SP) while the EP had their eyes closed and their hands on their laps. On the command of the SP, the EPs opened their eyes and recovered from the unusual attitude (90 degrees angle of bank, 40 degrees nose low). The results indicate that the response time (time from opening the eyes to making first input) were statistically significantly (F 1,104=4.14, p=0.044) longer in the SVS display condition when the wide FOV was used. We determined that some of the lake features on SVS caused confusion with the sky, thus resulting in longer response times. However, while the response times were longer with the wide FOV SVS, the recovery times were statistically significantly shorter (F 1,105=4.06, p=0.046) and the SVS-Wide display condition overall produced less altitude loss (2,531 ft) when compared to all other conditions on average (2,722 ft). This flight test investigated many aspects of recovery with standard EFIS and SVS in real flight conditions using an acrobatic capable aircraft and significant unusual attitude entry conditions. Recommendations are made with regard to managing the depiction of water features on SVS. Flight technically, recoveries were better with wide FOV SVS than with narrow FOV SVS or standard EFIS. Subjectively, EPs clearly preferred the wide FOV SVS.