Aviation Training Research

Abstract

As discussed in Chapter Four, the development of synthetic trainers during World War II was a major factor in the history of training devices. A major segment of training device research has been in the area of aviation training, primarily flight simulation. The history of this research has been documented by Koonce (1984) from the perspective of aviation psychology and by Waag (1981) from the perspective of visual and motion simulation. This chapter has drawn extensively from these two sources, as well as from original articles. It should be noted that many of the experiments reviewed in this and the next chapter can be considered applied research and suffer from one or more of the problems of control discussed in Chapter Five. However, in most cases, these studies provide the only data available on these specific tasks and instructional strategies. Until new data are generated through more rigorously controlled experiments, we must attempt to generalize from these studies.