Designing Aircraft Cockpit Displays: Borrowing from Multimodal User Interfaces

In this paper, we present an approach to design of command tables in aircraft cockpits. To date, there is no common standard for designing this kind of command tables. Command tables impose high load on human visual senses for displaying flight information such as altitude, attitude, vertical speed, airspeed, heading and engine power. Heavy visual workload and physical conditions significantly influence cognitive processes of an operator in an aircraft cockpit. Proposed solution formalizes the design process describing instruments in terms of estimated effects they produce on flight operators. In this way, we can predict effects and constraints of particular type of flight instrument and avoid unexpected effects early in the design process.