With flying colours: Pilot performance with colour-coded head-up flight symbology

Abstract

The manipulation of colour in display symbology design has long been recognised as a method to improve operator experience and performance. Recent developments in colour head-up display (HUD) and helmetmounted display (HMD) technology underline the necessity to understand the human factors considerations of symbology colour coding against conventional monochrome symbology formats. In this low-fidelity desktop human-in-the-loop experiment, the colour of flight symbology on an overlaid symbology set was coded as a redundant cue to indicate the accuracy of professional and non-professional pilots' flight profile across a range of simulated flight manoeuvres. The main finding of this study was that colour coding flight symbology supported the manual flying performance of both professional and non-professional pilots. Notably, colour-coding of the bank indicator and airspeed tape minimised performance error during turning and altitude change manoeuvres, respectively. The usability of colour coded symbology was also rated higher than the monochrome symbology. We conclude that colour coded HUD/HMD symbology is preferred by the user and may improve performance during low workload manual flying tasks. A fuller understanding of performance and workload effects will require future studies to employ higher workload flying tasks and examine the utility of colour coding within higher fidelity environments.

Workload benefits of colour coded head-up flight symbology during high workload flight

“…The primary finding from the study was that colour-coded feedback reduced the workload experienced by pilots, and that this perceived benefit was exclusive to flying conditions where pilots were under higher task load demands imposed by the presence of a secondary task. The absence of a reported workload benefit under low task load conditions is in line with the findings from our previous study [23]. In addition, the current findings clarifies the nature in which workload was likely reduced in Dudfield's 1991 study [22], where the specificity of the colour-coded related workload benefit was not reported.…”

“…Dudfield [22] found that colour-coded error feedback provided on HUD flight symbology did not support pilot flying accuracy during straight and level flight, but did benefit subjective workload. Findings from our own recent study [23] demonstrated that a similar colour-coded head up symbology set granted minor and major flying accuracy enhancements to professional airline pilots and novices, respectively. It is likely that the performance benefits found in our study arose from the more varied range of manoeuvres, such as climbing turns, that required pilots to attend to both dynamic and static flight parameters.…”

Low-visibility commercial ground operations: An objective and subjective evaluation of a multimodal display

“…For example, one participant remarked that the haptics acted as an effective "attention getter" during long straights to notify pilots of upcoming turns when arousal might have declined. Implementation of redundant cues from basic and applied research have reported similar effects [29][30][31][32][33][34][35].…”

The unpleasantness of thinking: A meta-analytic review of the association between mental effort and negative affect.

“…Performance feedback could take different forms. In some tasks, some display element turned green or red, indicating good or poor performance, respectively (Blundell et al, 2020a). In other tasks, a virtual agent gave verbal performance feedback (e.g., “Wow, you are really good at this”; Wang, Buchweitz, et al, 2020).…”