Stress Measurement and Inducement in Experiments with Low Cost Flight Simulator for Testing of General Aviation Pilots.

Full flight simulators are mainly a domain of airliner pilots. Such simulators with moving platform are high fidelity devices, which can reliably replicate real flight experience. Unfortunately the cost of a flight hour and maintenance is rather high and therefore not suitable for training of pilots of ultra-light aircraft. Yet there are accidents which might have been prevented with extended flight hours and additional training, like emergency landings, dealing with spiral spin, engine outage. Low cost simulators can be a viable solution for additional training and practice. This poster is based on data taken from stress inducing experiment. Poster presents analysis of physiological measurements taken from pilots interacting with a low cost 6DOF flight simulator of ultra-light aircraft with the goal to assess presence of stress and identify its generating factors. Proper identification and classification of these factors may help to generate such state during training and testing. The goal is to evaluate physiologically measurable response. The experiment attempts to generate stress with engine outage observing ECG and respiration signals.