11 – Pilot Control

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the human aspects of the flight control problem. Flight control by human pilots is one of the most studied and well understood of human activities. Quantitative models have been developed to describe and predict human control performance and workload, and these have been applied to study a wide range of significant problems such as aircraft handling qualities, display and control system design and analysis, and simulator design and use. These models do not replace human-in-the-loop simulation as a development tool, but instead are complementary to simulation, flight testing, and to more conventional human factors analyses. Despite the high level of understanding of human control that has been attained and the accomplishments alluded to above, there are a number of challenging problems and areas for research that remain or are arising. The evolution of aircraft, control and display systems, and mission requirements are imposing new problems in control. The future concern most often raised in connection with modeling and understanding the pilot in the aircraft control loop is the changed and changing nature of the pilot's task owing to the introduction of substantial amounts of automation. Thus, the roles of flight management and supervisory control are becoming dominant in many pilot-vehicle-display applications. As might be expected, the data and models needed for understanding these roles are not at all up to the standards of those for manual flight control tasks and are clearly in need of further development.