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The Effects of Pictorial Detail on the Timing of the Landing Flare: Results of a Visual Simulation Experiment

2000; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 10; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1207/s15327108ijap1003_05

1532-7108

Max Mulder, Jan-Mark Pleijsant, Hans van der Vaart, Piet van Wieringen,

Computer Graphics and Visualization Techniques

Artificial outside-world displays currently used in flight simulators may, in the future, also be applied to aircraft cockpits to enhance vision or to provide a completely synthetic replacement. In both cases, a very important question for designers of such displays is which elements of pictorial detail in the presented image are needed for satisfactory task or mission performance. Two elements of pictorial detail, a visible runway outline and ground texture, are considered in this article. An experiment is described in which the participants were required to initiate the landing maneuver during a simplified aircraft-landing task. This experiment was developed with 2 goals in mind: The first objective was to determine whether performance was influenced by the addition of ground texture; a second objective was to find out whether participants based their timing of the initiation of the landing maneuver on altitude perception or on the so-called time-to-contact (TTC; Lee, 1974). In the landing case, TTC is defined as the time remaining to the moment that the wheels make contact with the runway if no pilot action is taken. The results of the experiment show that landing performance is improved when ground texture is added to the display. The results also suggest that participants change their timing behavior from a strategy based on altitude perception when only a runway outline is present, to one based on TTC perception when texture is added to the display.