Incremental Transfer Effectiveness of a Ground-Based General Aviation Trainer

Abstract

Link trainers and similar synthetic flight-training devices have been used with varying effectiveness since before World War II. Currently available ground-based flight trainers differ widely in their degree and fidelity of simulation and in their associated costs. To provide a rational basis for trainer procurement, a method of assessing their cost effectiveness is needed. An experiment was conducted to establish the incremental transfer effectiveness of a representative ground-based general aviation trainer to serve as a basis for the evaluation of its incremental cost effectiveness. Four groups of student pilots were given, respectively, 0, 3, 7, and 11 hours of instruction in the Link GAT-1 concurrently with flight instruction in the Piper Cherokee airplane. Average flight times for the four groups to reach the private pilot criterion reflected the postulated negatively decelerated nature of the incremental transfer effectiveness function.