Flash Blindness Recovery for Pilots in the Modern Cockpit

Abstract

Intense light can cause flash blindness, a temporary visual impairment. We investigated how various factors influenced time to recover from flash blindness for a task resembling reading a cockpit heading display. Prior studies used only reflective displays while modern cockpits now include emissive displays, so recovery differences between display types were of interest as was the influence of ambient luminance level. Flash blindness recovery times ranged from five seconds to two minutes. Greater flash intensity and smaller (higher acuity) letters led to longer recoveries. For the reflective display, as ambient luminance increased, flash intensity had weaker influence on recovery times and recovery shortened overall. For the emissive display (white at 16 cd/m2) however, ambient luminance did not appreciably modulate recovery times. The reflective display was more advantageous for flash blindness recovery in high (100 cd/m2) ambient luminance and the emissive display was more advantageous in low (1 cd/m2) ambient luminance.