Analysis of Manual Control for Personal Aerial Vehicle with Flight Control System Degradation

Personal aerial vehicle (PAV) is recognized as a promising concept for the future urban air mobility. For such autonomous vehicle there could be a scenario when any passenger would be required to take control. A case of flight control system degradation would lead to manual control of optionally piloted PAV by the PAV occupants. In this paper human-in-the-loop experiments were conducted on rotorcraft PAV model with 30 PAV non-professional pilots. Experiments included subjective and objective analysis of the PAV pilots’ workload, flight precision and pilot model for given mission task elements. Two different types of displays, head-down primary flight display and head-up helmet mounted display, were used in experiment and their results were compared.