ABSTRACT
The Flightdeck and Air Traffic Control Collaboration Evaluation (FACE) project ran from November 2002 to January 2006 and was funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The FACE project took a joint cognitive systems approach to investigate the human factors requirements for the flightdeck of the future. Of particular importance was the issue of perceived urgency of speech and text communications. The findings are discussed in relation to perceived urgency, workload, situation awareness (SA), attention and overall task performance. One computer ran a tracking task in which participants were required to track a target using a joystick, whilst the other computer ran a perceived urgency task using Superlab software. Dependent variable measures were taken for perceived urgency ratings, workload, SA, number of commands responded to, tracking task accuracy, and response time to rate urgency. A key component of the project was the potential move away from speech-based radiotelephony (R/T) communications towards text-based datalink communications.
