The effect of spurious angular accelerations on tracking in dynamic simulation

A laboratory study was conducted to investigate the effect of spurious simulator yaw motions on a pilot's control performance. A second objective was to compare the efficiency of static and dynamic simulator tracking in previously unexamined vehicle dynamics. Twelve airline pilots served as subjects in a moving-base flight simulator under congruent-motion, spurious-motion, and no-motion conditions. The results indicated a significant increase in the amount of error with increasing levels of spurious motion during the initially administered series of trials. The influence of spurious motion, however, was absent in a second series of trials. The data suggest that the pilots learned to compensate in their performance for the spurious inputs. It was also found that congruent visual and rotational cueing produced superior performance to that of tracking with visual information alone.