Suchergebnisse

The majority of light aviation aircrafts cabins are unpressurised and this may pose risks for the safety of both pilots and passengers. As altitude increases partial oxygen pressure decreases and this situation may lead to early stages of hypoxia affecting pilot's capabilities to perform simple tasks. These factors combined in several ways may affect significantly the capability of a pilot to conduct a safe flight. Some work has been developed in this area and results show that even small changes in altitude can decrease pilot's oxygen level significantly. Thus, as pilot's behaviour and flying capabilities are affected, flight safety is compromise too. This work is generally focused on the acquisition and study of flight operational and physiological data that may affect pilot's capabilities and thus flight safety. To perform such objectives data acquired from the aircraft contains several items such as geographic coordinates, attitude, altitude, speed, g-load, heading, absolute pressure and temperature inside the cabin; also data acquired from the pilot contains several parameters such as cerebral oximetry, electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG). As pilot's own safety and comfort are important issues we developed a portable system that may be installed and operated in a safe and ergonomic way inside any light (small) aircraft cabin. Also this equipment is flexible enough so that it may be used inside a hypobaric chamber or in a flight simulator to test, prior a real flight, some specific pilot's reactions to different flight scenarios. The specific objective of this paper is to report the acquisition, processing and monitoring of flight data collected directly and in real time from both the aircraft and the pilot, so it may be analysed to determine pilot's major physiological changes facing different flight scenarios and the consequents alterations of his flying capabilities. Legislation for pilot licensing is quite similar all over Europe, and in practice it is not capable to prevent such in-flight individual performance problems. Taking in account the results of this work we also sustain the basis for a revision of the actual European legislation for pilot licensing, thus improving flight safety.

Light aviation pilots are exposed to many different environmental situations due to non-pressurized aircraft cabins. Those variations can push the human body to some limits, which associated with psychological factors may culminate in incidents or even fatalities. Really, a literature review on this theme suggests that a significant part of the incidents and fatalities within the light aviation that uses non-pressurized aircraft cabins are related to the human factor. This analysis might bring up a concealed but significant and worrying phenomenon in terms of flight safety: changes of pilot performance in the amendment of physiological parameters concerning to different pressure variations during the various flight stages. Flying is a reality that, although being used mostly for fast passenger and cargo transportation, also it is requested for leisure purposes by a very heterogeneous pool of pilots. This may be a concerning situation due to the disparity of human body (individual) reactions to flight conditions. Nature, both of environmental factors (like as pressure, temperature and humidity) or of human physiological behavior during different flight phases, is unpredictable. Therefore, it is very difficult to establish safety boundaries in this specific context. This work main objective is to analyze the influence of flight environmental conditions on pilot's physiological parameters and thus on tasks performance during different flight situations (or scenarios). In order to perform this analysis a portable and ergonomic monitoring system was built. This equipment records both the cerebral oximetry to study the phenomenon of hypoxia and its importance, and electrocardiography (ECG) and electroencephalography (EEG) parameters in order to establish a correlation among pressure variations, amount of mental workload, and several individual physiological parameters during different flight stages. The specific purpose of this study is how to define physiological limits for each pilot, calibrated through simulation tests contemplating different flight scenarios, in order to create in the next future a on board alert system to prevent possible incidents and fatalities. Also we suggest potential restrictions on European pilots licensing legislation for light aviation, based on some physiological boundaries, as a positive contribution to a safer flight environment.