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The Evolution of Aircraft Automation
Published in Charles E. Billings, Aviation Automation: The Search for A Human-Centered Approach, 2018
For those unfamiliar with glass cockpit terminology, Fig. 5.17 is a generic flight deck layout showing the panels that are discussed here. Up to 6 electronic display units, together with backup flight instruments (liquid crystal displays or electromechanical instruments) and a few critical systems indicators, are found on the main instrument panel. Aircraft systems controls are located on the overhead systems panel. A mode control panel (also called flight control unit) is located centrally on the glare shield below the windscreens. Other flight management system control units and communications controls are located on the pedestal between the pilots, together with power and configuration controls. These displays, together with paper documents, verbal communications, aural signals, and the pilots’ own knowledge, provide all real-time information to the pilots. The flexibility of glass cockpit displays has made it possible to provide any sort of information in new and different formats, and to modify that information in any way desired by designers to fit any need.
Plan B for Eliminating Mode Confusion: An Interpreter Display
Published in International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 2021
The flight deck interface presents annunciations about the state of the autoflight system on several interface components (collected in Figure 1): primary flight display (PFD, lower left), navigation display (ND, lower middle), mode control panel (MCP, top), and the flight management system (FMS) control display unit (CDU, lower right). Ideally, by monitoring these areas, a pilot can determine the state of autoflight; specifically, what authority it has, what altitude, heading, and airspeed targets it is using, and whether it will meet altitude and airspeed restrictions. When pilots fail to determine the autoflight system state, they can be the victims of mode confusion or “automation surprise,” as expressed in queries such as “What’s it doing now?” and “Why is it doing that?” (Itoh & Inagaki, 2004; Sarter & Woods, 1995; Wiener, 1985).
Fitts’ law on the flight deck: evaluating touchscreens for aircraft tasks in actual flight scenarios
Published in Ergonomics, 2023
Yubin Xie, Ronggang Zhou, Jianhong Qu
To explore the performance of three common aviation cockpit interaction devices in flight scenarios, as well as the variation of the three interaction devices when the environmental conditions change and the pilot status changes, this study used a 3 (flight scenarios: normal, turbulence, and startle and surprise) × 3 (control devices: a mode control panel (MCP), a control display unit (CDU) and a touch-based navigation display (TND)) mixed factorial experimental design with 16 different indices of difficulty (IDs) and collected data using movement time (MT), accuracy, user experience, forced choice and interviews from 15 participants.