Role identification of yaw and sway motion in helicopter yaw control tasks

A set of experiments has been conducted to investigate the relative effect of translational and rotational motion cues on pilot performance. Two helicopter yaw control tasks were performed on the SIMONA: a yaw capture task and a target-tracking task with simulated turbulence. The yaw capture task was a repetition of a task performed previously at two different simulator facilities. Shaping filters and added delays were used to match simulator characteristics with the previous experiments. In contrast to previous conclusions, results from the current study show more equal contributions of yaw and sway motion on performance and subjective simulator motion fidelity. Analyses of the different vestibular cues using multiloop pilot models, estimated from measurement data from the target-tracking task, also indicate comparable utilization of the yaw and sway motion cues.