Pickup of visual information by the pilot during a ground control approach in a fighter aircraft simulator.

Before providing the new single-seat fighter aircraft with selective visual information display systems, it is necessary to conduct new studies of the visual behavior of pilots flying these aircraft in order to determine the nature of information to be displayed. The authors describe a modified NAC Eye Mark recorder which can be used in tight spaces without any interfering light source and given an example of its use in an experiment conducted in a Mirage III R training simulator. The reported experiment was designed to analyse the visual behavior of 12 pilots of four different qualification levels who flew a ground control approach (GCA) test each day for five consecutive days. The results show that the pilot's visual behavior is stable, both on an intra- and inter-individual basis. In addition, it is possible to classify the control panel instruments as a function of the number of times and length of time they are checked.