Transfer of Landing Skills in Beginning Flight Training

Abstract

Beginning flight students from the University of Illinois flight training program were given two sessions of landing practice in a simulator with a computer-animated contact landing display before they commenced intensive landing practice in the aircraft. For each experimental student there was a control student, paired with the same instructor, who received no landing practice in the simulator. Experimental students required significantly fewer presolo landings in the airplane than did the paired controls, representing a potential saving of about 1.5 presolo flight hours per student. These data show that pretraining with a moderately detailed, yet relatively inexpensive, computer-animated landing display can offer worthwhile savings in flight time. Some students were provided adaptive visual augmentation during their simulator training, and there was evidence of incremental transfer attributable to this instructional feature.