Inside the Brain of an Expert Pilot

Landing a commercial flight full of people is a tense and complicated procedure. Pilots need to make split-second decisions with potentially disastrous consequences based on information from a complex array of instruments and visual cues. If you've ever flown or seen the inside of a cockpit, you've likely wondered about what's really going on in the brain of a trained pilot during these critical moments.

To discover the scientific answer to that question, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System ran 20 pilots with varying levels of experience through a flight simulator and recorded their brain activity using fMRI scans. Their results were published yesterday on PLOS One.

At 350 feet above the ground, the pilots were asked to use only their instruments to guide their course. Then at 200 feet, the height at which the FAA requires a clearly visible runway in order to land, the runway was obscured by varying levels of fog and the pilots were tasked with making the call on whether to land or not. This process required them to quickly look up from their instruments and make a split-second, potentially costly decision.​

As you might expect, the highly experienced pilots made the right call to land or not more often—80 percent of the time versus 64 percent for inexperienced pilots. But a curious finding emerged: the pilots with the most expertise had the least amount of activity in the regions of the brain associated with decision-making.

More experienced pilots especially exhibited limited activity in the the bilateral caudate nucleus, which regulates saccadic eye movement. That is, when the eyes quickly move to focus on another target, say, from an array of flight instruments to a runway.

"This lower activity in experts could be associated with a lower amount of saccades or a lower attentional effort and a better 'neural efficiency' in general," the authors wrote. "Regarding saccades, it is important to note that this decision was aided by a pilot's eye movements during an [Instrument Landing System] approach that are directed at the instruments and at landing visual markers at the [Decision Height]."

The researchers hypothesize that the lower levels of neural activity in experienced pilots—what they call "efficiency"—is due to years of knowledge on where to look and for what. Fewer eye movements and steady concentration are the marks of a seasoned pilot, and their brain scans show it.

Previous research has found that expertise is a key factor in whether a pilot is going to make it or not during a descent. Even if the pilot in question is a little older, one study found, sheer experience made up for any loss in their cognitive abilities.

This is an assuring finding in light of recent studies that raise serious concern over the security vulnerabilities in many apps and instruments that pilots bring into the cockpit with them. It confirms what one pilot told Motherboard in our investigation on the topic: any pilot worth their salt depends on a keen eye and sharp instincts in the air, along with their instruments.