Spatial Orientation in Aviation: Visual Contributions

Misjudgement of spatial orientation is reported to be an important factor in a substan-tial proportion of aviation accidents. The likelihood of such misjudgement is particularly high when there are conflicting interactions between labyrin-thine and visual signals. In a manoeuvering aircraft, visual information is often a crucial factor in the pilot's ability to judge the aircraft's altitude and po-sition with respect to external and terrain features. A body of research evidence supports the following conceptual framework. (1) The human visual sys-tem processes a limited number of visual dimensions almost independently of each other (for example, colour, luminance, spatial frequency, orientation, changing size, motion in depth, time to contact). (2) Each of these selective sensitivities shows con-siderable intersubject variability. (3) Intersubject variability is far from perfectly correlated across the set of selective sensitivities. This paper discusses the relevance of this framework for predicting, first the specific situations in which visual judgments are most likely to occur and, second, which indi-vidual pilots are most likely to make the visual misjudgements.