Effective Interventions in Rare Event Inspection

Abstract

Safe operation and airworthiness of the civil aviation fleet demands reliable inspection, often visual, of structure and components. Inspection involves both spatial and temporal uncertainty. Visual search failure and vigilance decrements are well-documented adverse consequences of spatial and temporal uncertainty. Whereas vigilance studies have typically been conducted over single prolonged session, the task of aircraft component inspection is a multi-session task. It was hypothesized that the vigilance findings from a single prolonged session would be applicable to multi-session tasks. Forty university students were recruited to perform a search task over 10 sessions. The two independent variables were the primary target rate and number of targets types. The probability of primary target detection did not exhibit a signal rate effect, but did show a multiple target effect. The analysis also suggested that the task differed significantly from a traditional vigilance task.