Effects of Advanced Cockpit Displays on General Aviation Pilots’ Decisions to Continue Visual Flight Rules Flight into Instrument Meteorological Conditions

Thirty pilots flew a simulated VFR cross country flight into deteriorating weather with one of three levels of display support: a control display with standard instruments, a synthetic vision system (SVS) display depicting terrain and a highway in the sky (HITS), and a configuration in which the same SVS HITS display was augmented by an electronic moving map depicting weather. Results revealed that nearly all pilots in the control condition avoided penetrating the IMC clouds. Significantly, 60% of pilots across both SVS conditions penetrated the clouds and continued to their destination in zero visibility conditions. Their failure to notice the deteriorating weather outside the cockpit was documented by a dominance of headdown scanning for the pilots in these two groups who penetrated the weather. The presence of the moving map weather display did not mitigate these manifestations of attentional tunneling. Possible solutions related to display design and training are discussed.