Task Management (TM) refers to the function in which the human operator
manages his/her available sensory and mental resources in a dynamic, complex, safety-critical
environment in order to accomplish the multiple tasks competing for a limited
quantity of attention. There is reason to believe that the level of automation on the
commercial aircraft flight deck may effect TM, however to date there has been little
research that directly addresses this effect. Thus, the primary objective of this study was
to begin evaluating the relationship between TM of commercial airline pilots and the
level of automation on the flight deck by determining how automation affects the
frequency of Task Prioritization errors as reported in Aviation Safety Reporting System
(ASRS) incident reports. The secondary objective of this study was to create a
methodology that modeled an effective way to use ASRS incident report data in an
inferential analysis.
Two samples of ASRS incident reports were compared. The first sample was
composed of 210 incident reports submitted by pilots flying advanced technology aircraft
and the second sample was composed of 210 incident reports submitted by pilots flying
traditional technology aircraft. To help avoid confounding effects, the two samples were
further divided into three sub-samples each made up of 70 reports submitted during a
specified time period: 1988-1989, 1990-1991, and 1992-1993. Each incident report was
analyzed using an incident analysis form designed specifically for this study. This form
allowed the analyst to classify the incident report as either containing a Task
Prioritization error or not based on the narrative of the report.
Twenty-eight incident reports from the advanced technology sample and 15 from the traditional technology sample were classified as containing Task Prioritization errors. Using the Chi Square (x��) test and a significance level of 0.05, this difference was found to be statistically significant. / Graduation date: 1998
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/33661 |
| Date | 13 February 1998 |
| Creators | Wilson, Jennifer Rae |
| Contributors | Funk, Kenneth H. II |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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