To maintain their excellent safety standards, Qantas is leveraging the benefits of eye tracking technology to make their pilot training more efficient and effective.

Matt Gray explains the success he’s had using this capability for training in a simulator environment, sharing a real-life example.

This is one of five short snippets exploring the real-time benefits of eye tracking with Qantas senior Training and Checking executives at their headquarters in Sydney.

Video Transcript

Patrick Nolan 0:24
I think I’ve heard you say this a few times Matt is, new technology, you know, it can be interesting and, and when it’s new, people want to see what it’s like, but you only get success when it becomes part of developing capability. So it’s no longer about the technology, it’s around how does that integrate? What have you actually found when you’ve been running sim sessions in the 787? Are there any stories or any examples you can share around what you’ve seen?

Matt Gray 0:50
One of the things that I wanted to do with the eye tracker is that, if you’re going to understand a pilot scan, and if they had a scan that required some training input, you had to be able to do something in the simulator. And without the eye tracker, as an instructor, I’ll make a, a guess, a pretty well, good educated guess of where a pilot is, is looking or not looking based on where I would be looking at the time.

The eye tracker will actually quantify that and say this is exactly where this pilot is looking. Now I’ve had great success, I use it every simulator session I, that I now run, for both recurrent and for type ratings.

And I’ve had some great successes, particularly on the Head-Up Display, because the HUD itself is not necessarily, for many people, intuitive. There’s a relationship between guidance cue, flight path vector and aircraft symbol, which requires a little bit of cognitive thought, and I remember having one second officer who came in, he said, I really don’t understand where I’m looking. I don’t, I don’t get it.

So we put him on the eye tracker and he had a fundamental breakdown on understanding of these three key points to look on the HUD. He wasn’t looking in the right spot. And I said, oh, I filmed it. I showed him and I said, that’s where you’re looking at, but you should be looking in these areas primarily, not where you’re looking now.

So a little bit of guidance, I said, look here instead, and in 15 minutes we completely solved his problem on the anxiety that, that he carried into the simulator. There you go, it’s fixed now, and there’s a copy for you.

And you’re able to do it there and then. It’s no good doing it later on in the debrief because they have to practice it straight away with the new knowledge that they have. And that is the great thing about the sim, and the great thing about the combination of the sim and the eye tracker. And I’ve had great success in it. And even validating pilots who say, oh, I think I might have rotated a little bit slowly, and you go, no you didn’t, look at that. There’s an effective scan because you were doing this. And I’ve had great success with it. I’m very glad we got it.