DUAL TASK INVESTIGATION OF PILOTS SKILL LEVEL

Performances of instructor pilots and student pilots were compared in a dual task paradigm combining a ground controlled approach (GCA) as the primary task and memory search as the subsidiary task. In the first experiment the difference in subsidiary task performance between single and dual conditions was greater for a group of students in the middle phase of T-37B training than for a group of experienced instructor pilots. Between-group differences on the search task were restricted to the y-intercept of the function relating reaction time to memory set size. It was concluded that the effect of experience on the type of flight task examined here is to reduce the processing demands of encoding and (or) responding. In the second experiment a group of student pilots who had just completed T-37B training was run in the same task to determine the sensitivity of the dual task to less disparate amounts of flying experience. The difference in memory search performance between single and dual conditions for the late-phase students was quite similar to that of the instructor pilots and was significantly less than that of mid-phase students. That dual task performance discriminated between student groups differing in only four weeks of training suggests that the dual task paradigm has considerable potential value in providing an objective measure of flight proficiency. © 1979 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.