A Flight Centered Approach to Assess Dynamic Flight Simulator Force Cueing Fidelity

With an aging aircraft fleet and an ongoing period of combat, the USAF must look more to ground based simulation to supplement flight training. Objective measures are needed, however, to insure that a training environment with limitations in force cueing adequately transfers back to flight. The objective of a continuing program conducted by Systems Technology, Inc. for the Air Force Research Laboratory is to leverage the significant past research with a flight-centered approach to produce effective qualitative and quantitative measures of simulator force cueing fidelity as it relates to tactical aircraft flight training. The selected measures are being incorporated into a software toolbox known as Real-Flight that will be used to compare simulator with related flight data. To exhibit feasibility of the approach, a demonstration version of the toolbox was created that featured an exemplar set of task performance, pilot-vehicle system, psychophysiological, and qualitative (i.e., pilot ratings and comments) metrics. A limited piloted simulation was conducted using a fixed- base simulator with variations in pilot control inceptors and visual displays. Because the participating pilots did not fly the selected tasks in flight, existing flight test data were used to make direct comparisons between simulation and flight. This was done more as an exercise to show how the process works, rather than to draw specific conclusions. Furthermore, no psychophysiological measures were available in the existing flight test data. Thus, a face/eyes tracking system was used to show how such a system could be integrated with a flight simulator and how relevant measures could be collected and synched with the simulator transient data. These processes were successfully demonstrated leading to a prototype development program that is now underway.