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Spatial Orientation and Disorientation
Published in Anthony N. Nicholson, The Neurosciences and the Practice of Aviation Medicine, 2017
In daylight with clear external visual conditions, pilots gain the information they need about the aircraft attitude from looking outside the aircraft. In these circumstances they are said to be flying in visual meteorological conditions. In cloud, at night or when visual conditions deteriorate to the extent that they cease to give an unambiguous attitude reference to pilots, they are obliged to transfer to the aircraft instruments and are said to be flying in instrument meteorological conditions. The most important of these instruments is the attitude indicator, which is generally placed centrally on the instrument panel in front of the pilot, though it may be less prominent in aircraft in which the head-up display has become the primary attitude reference. In older aircraft, in which there is a separate instrument for each function, the flight control instruments are typically laid out in the form of a T, with the airspeed indicator to the left of the attitude indicator, the barometric altitude to the right and the gyro compass below. For this configuration, the pilot has to set up a radial scan pattern centred around the attitude indicator to check in turn the aircraft attitude, heading, attitude, airspeed, attitude, altitude and so on.
Spatial Displays
Published in Christopher D. Wickens, Justin G. Hollands, Simon. Banbury, Raja. Parasuraman, Engineering Psychology and Human Performance, 2015
Christopher D. Wickens, Justin G. Hollands, Simon. Banbury, Raja. Parasuraman
Or consider the traditional aircraft attitude indicator (or artificial horizon display), which shows the aircraft#x2019;s orientation in space (an aircraft#x2019;s attitude includes roll, pitch, and yaw, but here we will concentrate on roll, when the wings dip left or right). Here, a stable aircraft is positioned relative to a moving horizon (see Figure 4.9a). This looks like what the pilot sees through the aircraft window (because of this, it is sometimes referred to as an inside-out display), and therefore conforms to the PPR. But when the plane rotates (rolls or banks) it is the horizon not the aircraft that moves. This violates the PMP because pilots perceive the world as stable and the aircraft moving through it (Johnson & Roscoe, 1972). Furthermore, the horizon will rotate in an opposite direction to the aircraft, hence inviting confusion and an incompatible response (Roscoe, 2004). As above, constructing the display so that the aircraft moves and the horizon is stationary (an outside-in display) produces the opposite problem. It violates the PPR, since the static picture that is drawn (horizontal horizon, tilted airplane) is incompatible with what the pilot perceives through the window (tilted horizon, horizontal airplane).
Attitude Indicator Design in Primary Flight Display: Revisiting an Old Issue With Current Technology
Published in The International Journal of Aerospace Psychology, 2018
Simon Müller, Vitalij Sadovitch, Dietrich Manzey
Flying an aircraft in instrument meteorological conditions (IMC), for example, clouds or night skies, precludes the direct reference to the outside view, possibly contributing to an unrecognized spatial disorientation. Spatial disorientation can be defined as an “erroneous sense of one’s position and motion relative to the plane of the earth’s surface” (Gillingham & Previc, 1993, p. 77) and has been a constant contributing factor to a number of fatal aviation accidents (Comstock, Jones, & Pope, 2003; Gibb, Ercoline, & Scharff, 2011; Poisson & Miller, 2014; Roscoe, 2004). Especially untrained and beginner pilots who are not familiar with flying under IMC tend to experience difficulties maintaining proper spatial orientation, when unsuspectedly losing the natural horizon as visual reference (Roscoe, 2004). In IMC, pilots depend on the attitude indicator (AI) to assess the orientation of their aircraft. The AI is one among other instruments that offer ownship orientation information. It provides information on the aircraft’s pitch and bank angles in relation to the natural horizon and represents the central element of the primary flight display (PFD) in modern aircraft.