ABSTRACT
In Europe, airports become more and more the bottlenecks compared to all flight phases of gate-to-gate flight operation. Because of their weather dependency, their strict time constraints (slots), their inflexible layout, etc., they often cannot cope with the traffic demand and thus cause traffic jams, delays, incidents or even accidents. This study supplements a series of prior and concurrent field trials testing the operational benefit of an Advanced Surface Movement Guidance and Control System (A-SMGCS). A-SMGCS comprises a range of new enabling technologies for both the flight deck and the air traffic control tower and is expected to significantly increase the planning and management of all aircraft and authorized vehicles on the movement area. Four commercial pilots performed a series of take-off and landing scenarios including extended taxi movements that were completed in a fixed-base cockpit simulator. The effectiveness of the DLR onboard guidance system TARMAC-AS is examined that combines flight deck to ground communication via data-link (DL) with an electronic moving map (EMM) to display airport surface traffic to the pilot crew. Evaluation was based on subjective questionnaires, route deviations, and visual scanning data based on eye-point-of-gaze measurements. Results support the notion that EMM + DL first, improve awareness of the global airport surface situation, second, lower the workload associated with R/T communication, third, allow for efficient taxi movements, and finally, provides important recommendations regarding operational HMI aspects and new procedures that has to be applied in the future.
