Examining New Flight Deck Technology Using Human Performance Modeling

Aircraft flight deck synthetic vision systems (SVS) always provide a “clear day” view and hence have the potential to improve safety in commercial aviation. Approach, landing, and taxi operations will most readily profit from the SVS capabilities. A part-task simulation study provided data on pilot performance using a baseline and an SVS-equipped flight deck. One effect of adding the separate SVS to the flight deck was that pilot scan patterns changed significantly—more time was devoted to the attitude displays and less to the navigation display. Concern over the change in well-established scan patterns lead to the suggestion that the SVS, an attitude display, be combined with the primary flight display as a single Enhanced-SVS attitude display rather than augment it as a separate display. A human performance model study was used to reproduce the results of the part-task study and then establish that the Enhanced-SVS attitude instrument would restore the original pilot scan pattern.