Modern commercial air travel is considered by most transportation specialists to be the safest of all forms of transportation. While safe, any loss of life is tragic and the only really acceptable state of commercial air transport safety is that of 'zero-tolerance' where no accident is acceptable.
Research has demonstrated that the largest single causal component for airline accidents is the flightcrew. In addition, the recent automation of these machines has created many new safety concerns involving flightcrew situational awareness, human-machine interfacing, workload, attention, and complexity, to name a few.
These concerns led to a series of studies developing, refining, and testing numerous aspects of this issue. The studies incorporated ASRS (Aviation Safety Reporting System) incident reports, NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) and other accident reports, and the development of a CTM (cockpit task management) system. The information gained from this research led to the development of an agent-based cockpit task aiding system termed the AgendaManager.
A traditional text-based display similar to that used in the CTMS study was developed, optimized, and integrated with existing systems like EICAS (Engine Indicating and Crew Alerting System) using a visual display development guide developed from a literature review. An alternate display incorporating graphics and located on the primary flight display (PFD) was also developed in an effort to improve pilot agenda management performance. Both of the interfaces were developed using a comprehensive visual display design guide compiled through a literature review.
The Agenda Manager displays were tested in order to determine if the PFD enhancements improved agenda management performance. Eleven general aviation pilots participated in the study, three in the pilot study and eight in the main study. Results from the main study indicate little, if any, difference in agenda management performance in regards to the display format used. In general, the study demonstrated the usefulness of the display guidelines, importance of tracking instrument rating when using general aviation pilots in an experiment, and the equivalence of 'round-trip' scenarios. / Graduation date: 1998
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/33750 |
| Date | 05 June 1997 |
| Creators | Wilson, Robert B. (Robert Brian) |
| Contributors | Funk, Kenneth H. |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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