ABSTRACT
With the anticipated increase in traffic density and the desire for flexible curved approach paths, the pilot’s task demanding load will increase, especially in situations where it is already very high. To avoid that future developments impair safety, better navigation and guidance displays must be developed which require less effort from the pilot to stay on top and ahead of the situation. To reduce the sudden build-up of workload, displays should provide information which enables pilots to operate in an open-loop mode allowing anticipation of future events. Navigation, guidance, and control are not three independent tasks. To maintain a high degree of cognitive coupling between the tasks, displays should reflect the relation between them. The idea behind current guidance displays is to isolate the control task and treat the pilot as a servo mechanism. This is an enormous waste of the capabilities of the human operator. Rather than spending the major part of his resources to behave like a good servo, the role of the human operator should be to compensate for the limited flexibility of the automated systems. The displays have to provide the information the pilot needs to monitor and anticipate the situation as it develops, and intervene with maximum efficiency when necessary. In the context of the Delft Program for Hybridized Instrumentation and Navigation Systems (DELPHINS), displays have been developed and tested which have the potential to satisfy the previously mentioned requirements. This paper provides an analysis of the chains of events which can results in a navigation accident, identifies possibilities to increase the likelihood of detection of situations which can result in an accident, and shows how these findings have been used in the development of the DELPHINS Tunnel-in-the-Sky display.
