Assessment of individual and dyadic workload of student and instructor pilots in real and simulated flight: An exploratory study

Flight instructors are vital in the training of novice pilots. Just as the mental workload in student pilots fluctuates during training, so does the mental workload of the instructors, affecting their dyadic performance and judgment. This paper explored how training environments (simulated vs. real flight), flight control conditions (student pilot flying vs. monitoring), and flight phases (take-off vs. downwind vs. landing) could affect mental workload in student and instructor pilots, as well as their interpersonal coordination through electrocardiography (ECG) based measures. Student pilots performed four consecutive standard flight traffic patterns with an instructor in a simulator and in real flight, under different flight control conditions of varying workload demands, while their ECG signals were recorded. The results indicated different patterns of interpersonal coordination between simulated and real flight. The other experimental variables, i.e., flight control and flight phase, mostly had an effect on participants’ heart rate and heart rate variability. In accordance with the existing literature, heart rate increased in high workload conditions and flight phases, whilst heart rate variability decreased. Additionally, we observed a linear relationship between subjective workload and physiological synchrony which indicates that student-instructor coordination increased as the student pilot experienced more mental workload in the flight tasks. The current study highlights that individual workload as well as dyadic workload, measured through cardiac signals, can be used to evaluate student-instructor coordination during flight training as an indicator of training outcomes.