Three flight simulator experiments examined how a health monitoring system may aid pilots in detecting flight control faults. The first experiment introduced an unexpected fault in the flight control system during an approach to a fictitious airport. The second experiment used a factorial design of (1) presence ?? notof a Fault Meter display and (2) presence ?? not ?? an Alerting System, which could have one or two phased alerts. In half the runs, a fault was triggered at some point, and pilot response was recorded. The next experiment comprised one flight in which pilots were given a false alarm by these systems, testing for automation bias. No consistent pilot response was found to the faults, with pilots sometimes successfully landing the aircraft, sometimes immediately or eventually initiating a go-around, and sometimes loosing aircraft control and crashing. The pilots were not able to identify the fault in 11% of the cases. Tunnel tracking error increased following the faults and the false alarm, suggesting it may be both a manifestation of attempts to diagnose a fault and a cue to pilots of a problem. Finally, the triggering of a false alarm showed the existence of automation bias induced after a small number of interactions with the HMS.

This work describes the visualization design of the flight related quantities in a cockpit of a modern light sport aircraft. It focuses on the utilization of the state of the art trends in flight data displays and introduces the innovative implementation of the aircraft's energy state smart clues that reduce pilots' workload. The initial part of the work presents a research into the flight, engine and navigation data presentation on analog instruments, followed by their illustrative depiction in glass cockpits. Within the framework of this thesis, Microsoft Flight Simulator has been used as a source of the flight related data. Final advances in the display design were introduced through the implementation of the synthetic vision system and a visualization of the virtual tunnel in the sky.