Piloting a commercial aircraft involves performing multiple tasks in a real-time
environment that require pilot's attention and cognitive resource allocation. Due to resource
limitation, pilots must perform cockpit task management (CTM) because they cannot perform
all tasks that demand their attention at once. Hence, pilots must prioritize the tasks in the order
of most to least important and allocate their resources according to this prioritization.
Over the years, pilots have developed rules of thumb for task prioritization in
facilitating CTM. A task prioritization error is simply an error made by the flight crew when
they perform lower priority tasks as opposed to higher priority tasks, where priority is
determined by the Aviate-Navigate-Communicate-Manage Systems (A-N-C-S) task ordering.
Although the level of flight deck automation has been suggested as one factor
influencing the likelihood of task prioritization errors, there has so far been just one study
directed towards confirming that hypothesis. Hence the first objective of this study was to
determine the effect of the level of automation on CTM performance. CTM performance was
measured by looking at the number of task prioritization errors committed by pilots in
different levels of automation. In addition to the level of automation, there was also reason to
believe that the pilot's automation proficiency might affect CTM performance. Therefore, the
second objective of this study was to determine the effect of automation proficiency on CTM
performance.
Nine airline transport pilots served as subjects in this study. Three flying scenarios
and three levels of flight deck automation were simulated on a part-task flight simulator. Each
pilot ran three different combinations of flight deck automation and flying scenario. The CTM
performance for each pilot was determined by identifying the number of task prioritization
errors committed in each experiment run. The average number of errors in different levels of
automation and automation proficiency were compared for their effect on CTM performance
using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). It was found that the level of automation affected
CTM performance depending scenarios in which phases of flight differed. However,
automation proficiency, measured by glass cockpit hours, was found to have no effect on
CTM performance. / Graduation date: 2000
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/33223 |
| Date | 30 August 1999 |
| Creators | Suroteguh, Candy Brodie |
| Contributors | Funk, Kenneth H. |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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