Visual scan patterns reflect to human-computer interactions on processing different types of messages in the flight deck

Abstract

The flight deck of commercial aircraft is sophisticated and searching for the necessary information at the right time is sometimes challenging. This research investigates pilot's visual parameters while interacted with two different designs of crew alerting system by eye tracking technology. There are 24 aviation professionals that participated in this experiment including commercial pilots, private pilots and avionic engineers. Compared with traditional design, the new integrated design applied proximity compatibility principles to assist pilots in searching necessary information to deal with urgent situations. The results demonstrated that the integrated design is superior to traditional design in providing accurate instructions as determined by visual behaviors. However, the integrated design increases pilot's situation awareness by redirecting attention from current task to the most critical task with the cost of a longer total fixation duration time. Pilot's visual parameters demonstrated significant differences while interacting with PFD mainly numeric, ND mostly by symbols and EICAS with presented text messages. Therefore, flight deck design has to adopt a holistic approach as pilot's visual attentions is shifting among all types of different displays to gain situation awareness rather than focus on only one display. The design of integrated EICAS can provide detailed instructions to deal with urgent situations which induced higher cognitive loads as pilot's pupil dilation is significant bigger than interacted with traditional design. By eye tracking technology, it is applicable to design human-centered flight decks to improve safety and human performance in aviation.

Augmented visualization cues on primary flight display facilitating pilot's monitoring performance

“…This can be linked to the cognitive effort required to interpret the FMA text and projecting its future status (Mumaw, Sarter, & Wickens, 2001). Applying the principle of human-centred design in the flight deck can significantly enhance pilot's monitoring performance and reduce cognitive workload (Li, Zhang, Minh, Cao, & Wang, 2019), and increase capability to perform complex tasks (Wickens & Hollands, 2000).…”

“…There is a fundamental requirement on the design principle to keep the "operator" informed about the system's intentions and current operating modes (Debernard, Chauvin, Pokam, Langlois, 2016). The Proximity Compatibility Principle and salient design have been applied not only in aviation (Ding & Proctor, 2017;Li et al, 2019), but also unmanned vehicles (Calhoun, Ruff, Behymer, & Frost, 2018), automation technology (Yamani & McCarley, 2018), electronic medical records (Zahabi, Kaber, & Swangnetr, 2015), digital alarm systems in nuclear power plants (Liu, Hwang, Hsieh, Liang, & Chuang, 2016). The presentation of proximity information must be salient and distinctive to uphold operator's perception and support 'at a glance' information retrieval by employing pre-attentive cues such as colour, shape, opacity, or texts (Bennett & Flach 2011;Selkowitz, Lakhmani, & Chen, 2017).…”

Interface design on cabin pressurization system affecting pilot's situation awareness: The comparison between digital displays and pointed displays

“…The accident investigation report identified the following issues, which contributed to this accident, including pilots unaware of the cabin pressurization selector in the manual position; nonidentification of the warnings and the reasons for the activation of the warnings (Cabin Altitude Warning Horn, Passenger Oxygen Masks Deployment indication, Master Caution); incapacitation of the flight crew due to hypoxia, resulting in the continuation of the flight via the flight management computer and the autopilot, depletion of the fuel, engine flameout, and the impact of the aircraft with the ground (Air Accident Investigation & Aviation Safety Board, ). The enhancement of a pilot's SA is becoming a major task for interfaces designers, automation development engineers, and human factors experts in different domains of the aviation industry (Li, Zhang, Minh, Cao, & Wang, ).…”

“…The integrated design based on Proximity Compatibility Principle (Wickens & Carswell, ) of Crew Alerting System (CAS) is significantly quicker than the conventional design on both finding the solutions and the task completion time (Li et al, ). Human factors engineering is there to improve interface design by understanding operator's cognitive processing while interacting with automation systems in the flight deck.…”

“…It is not possible to divide the instrument design from the controls design in a flight deck because they are both part of the functioning settings where pilots perform tasks of flight operations. The term interface design will also encompass the specific procedures and checklists that structure the pilot's actions in specific phases of flight including non‐normal and emergency procedures (Li et al, ). If human‐centered concepts are not adequately integrated into the early stages of flight deck design, that might then trigger accidents in future flight operations.…”