Objective Assessment of Student Naval Flight Officer Fatigue during Primary Flight Training.

摘要

Fatigue continues to pose a serious threat to the health, safety, and operational effectiveness of military aircrew. Recent efforts to mitigate the effects of fatigue have focused on the identification of individualized 'readiness-to-fly' screening measures. Eye-tracking measures, such as saccadic velocity in a simple visual tracking task, have shown promise in the laboratory setting for their ability to detect and quantify fatigue-related performance decrements in a military aviation population subjected to sleep restriction. Despite their effectiveness under controlled laboratory conditions, it is uncertain whether such measures are sensitive enough to detect subtle variations in fatigue resulting from nightly variability in sleep quantity. The purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between naturally varying sleep quantity and eye-tracking measures of fatigue in an operational setting. Thirty-one Student Naval Flight Officers (SNFOs) (average age = 24.1 years SD = 2.06) from Training Air Wing 6 at NAS Pensacola participated. Preliminary results suggest that eye-tracking measures sensitive to fatigue in the laboratory may also be sensitive to naturally occurring patterns of fatigue in an actual training context. Further research is necessary to identify these factors and provide context for further interpretation of the current results.