GUN-CAMERA RECORDS AS MEASURES OF PEDESTAL SIGHT GUNNERY PROFICIENCY

摘要

Although most of the research on pedestal sight gunnery skills has used ground devices to measure gunner proficiency, there have been continuing attempts to measure proficiency in the air. These attempts have been motivated primarily by considerations of simulation. It has been thought that the aerial situation may provide a closer simulation of the conditions of aerial combat which influence gunner performance than is obtained on present ground devices. In constructing these devices, the available resources have been concentrated on simulating the sighting equipment and the gross motion of attacking aircraft, and on developing dependable target presentation and scoring systems. Less attention has been paid to other aspects of the aerial combat situation which might influence gunner performance, such as vibration, noise, temperature extremes, etc.n However, the aerial situation has provided no ready answer to the problems of simulation. Although the gun-camera can be used to obtain a record of gunner performance in the air, and logically defensible scores can be derived from these records, the gun-camera scores so obtained have exhibited poor measurement qualities. Gun-camera scores typically have shown discouragingly low reliability, presumably because of the uncontrolled variation inherent in the aerial situation. Even when the aerial situation has been subject to a high degree of experimental control, correlations between single mission of the order of only 0.3-0.4 have been obtained (12, 16). When experimental control has not been exercised, between-mission correlations of the order of 0.1 have been reported.