The identification of the pilot actions in the cockpit is of significant importance for the accurate calculation of the pilot's workload. At present, the research about action identification generally focused on special actions, such as walking and jumping, which is not applicable for the pilot inside cockpit. As the pilot actions are basically implemented by the hand, the pilot action identification can be considered as the pilot hand movement identification. A novel technique is proposed here for the identification of the pilot actions based on the depth information, which tracks the pilots hands at first, and then identifies the pilot action. In addition, an approach to activate the algorithm is also presented for automatic recognition of the actions. The results of the experiments show that the identification rate of the technique is about 94. 06%, indicating that it can precisely identify the pilot actions in the cockpit.