Development of a Psychometrically Validated Spatial Disorientation Skills Assessment Tool

Spatial Disorientation (SD) is a contributing factor in many fatal aircraft accidents, resulting in significant loss of life and equipment.  For example, an analysis of SD mishaps in the U.S. Air Force from 1993 to 2013 identified 72 SD mishaps at a cost of 101 lives, 65 aircraft, and 2.32 billion dollars.  Further, published statistics may understate the severity of the SD problem.  Some researchers argue that SD accidents are underreported due to a variety of factors, including a failure to properly recognize some types of visual illusions as SD.  A tool that effectively measures the critical knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) for combatting SD hazards will play an integral role in developing and deploying improved SD training that reduces aviation accident rates and the associated human and economic costs.  The proposed research will develop and validate the SD Skills Assessment Tool (SD-SAT), a survey and observation tool for assessing KSA for SD hazard mitigation. Though primarily a software tool, (SD-SAT) will also leverage inexpensive COTS hardware to stimulate sensory illusions.  One immediate application will be evaluation of candidate SD training programs/tools for procurement purposes.  In this capacity, SD-SAT can be employed both before and after pilots complete candidate training programs to assess improvement as a result of those programs.  Results prior to training can also be used to group test subjects so that the set of pilots being used to evaluate each program represents a similar distribution of skill levels prior to training.  Other potential uses for SD-SAT include routine assessment of SD skills, which could be employed to make decisions such as the frequency of training that will be applied across the fleet, or to make decisions regarding training needs for individual pilots.  SD-SAT will include multiple component scales to cover the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains.  These scales will include written questions, as well as innovative use of virtual reality (VR) tasks to assess aspects of pilot performance that cannot be effectively measured with written questions alone.  VR tasks will use low-cost, commercial-off-the-shelf hardware to stimulate sensory illusions that can lead to SD, and will measure pilots’ performance at recognizing and mitigating SD hazards.  A set of SD tasks in a full-cockpit motion simulator will be developed to serve as the “gold-standard” benchmark of SD hazard mitigation performance, and the psychometric validation work will demonstrate a direct relationship between performance measured by SD-SAT and the “gold-standard” benchmark.  The psychometric validation process will also allow identification of a minimal set of SD-SAT criteria sufficient to reliably assess relevant SD KSA.  The result will be a validated SD-SAT tool can be applied easily and at very low cost to assess SD KSA.