Variation of Pilots’ Mental Workload Under Emergency Flight Conditions Induced by Different Equipment Failures: A Flight Simulator Study

Pilots’ excessive mental workload could reduce their ability to perform concurrent tasks during emergency flights, which is one of the most critical aviation safety concerns. Several past efforts have attempted to investigate the underlying issues, but all had limited success owing to the challenge of collecting representative data under realistic operating conditions. This study aimed to address this challenge by conducting a flight simulator study involving a comparatively large number of participants, who were pilot cadets with flight experience, and using noninvasive functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to collect the pilots’ brain activity data. Pilots’ subjective ratings and brain activity records were collected over a total of 75 simulated flights under three subtask scenarios comprising different equipment failures. A statistical analysis was carried out on the subjective ratings and on the changes observed in the saturation of the oxyhemoglobin (ΔOxyHb) of individual fNIRS channels. The mental workload of the pilots was classified using a support vector machine hierarchical combination classifier, focusing on the question of whether it is feasible to classify pilots’ mental workload using brain activity signals (i.e., ΔOxyHb). The results suggested that the pilots’ mental workload levels were highly associated with the ΔOxyHb measures as well as with the activities of different brain regions, including the prefrontal-, motor-, and occipital cortex. The findings from this study could provide a reference for optimizing pilot training systems and improving pilot performance during emergency flight operations.