Effects of unexpected event urgency and flight scenario familiarity on pilot trainees performance and stress responses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pilot trainees’ ability to manage unexpected events is crucial for aviation safety, yet the impact of event urgency and flight scenario familiarity on pilot performance remains under-explored. This study investigates how different urgency levels of unexpected events influence pilot trainees’ flight performance, heart rate, and anxiety in both familiar (single-engine) and less familiar (twin-engine) flight scenarios. Two controlled experiments were conducted using flight simulators: Experiment 1 involved 27 pilot trainees operating a Cessna 172 single-engine simulator under low-urgency and high-urgency conditions, while Experiment 2 involved 25 pilot trainees using a FTD D40/D42 twin-engine simulator, introducing an additional no-event baseline. In the single-engine flight scenario, high-urgency unexpected events significantly impaired pilot trainees’ performance (Cohen’ d = 0.454) and increased anxiety (η p 2 = 0.229). In the twin-engine flight scenario, high-urgency unexpected events significantly impaired flight performance (MEI increased, η p 2 = 0.737), elevated heart rate (η p 2 = 0.516), and increased anxiety levels (η p 2 = 0.442) compared to low-urgency events, which had minimal effects and, in some cases, improved pilot trainees focus. Additionally, pilot trainees performed better and exhibited lower anxiety in familiar scenarios, suggesting that task familiarity mitigates the negative impact of high-urgency unexpected events. These findings highlight the importance of incorporating urgency-based training scenarios and cross-aircraft training to enhance pilot trainees’ adaptive responses to unexpected events, ultimately improving flight safety.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".