ABSTRACT
Tel: +31 20 6052375, fax: +31 20 605 2895 e-mail: nibbelke@nlr.nl
Keywords: aviation, pursuit display, compensatory display, flight director
The objective of this study is to investigate two new Flight Director displays with respect to their acceptability and possible advantages. The new displays were of the pursuit type and aimed to increase situational awareness, by providing additional information, without a significant increase in workload. These new displays were compared to the conventional compensatory flight director display. For each display five airline pilots conducted part task experiments and a complex approach. Two different levels of control automation were compared, to determine the applicability of the displays in conventional manual control systems and possible future control systems with automatic inner-loop aircraft stabilisation. The results show that despite the relative unfamiliarity with the new displays, pilots can achieve an equivalent level of performance with acceptable workload. A pursuit display with a vertical and lateral displaced guidance symbol (in earth axis) appears most promising, because it showed an increase in pitch awareness at an equal level of workload.
