Operational Alerting on Modern Commercial Flight Decks

The glass cockpit and EFB enable new ways of information presentation and interaction on the flight deck of modern commercial jets. This information supports crews in flight plan management, which essentially entails evaluating the plan against (ever-changing) flight constraints and, if necessary, modifying it. Flight constraints emerge from the interaction between the system and its operational environment. Understanding the constraints, and checking the flight plan against these constraints, requires selection and combination of information from many sources. Operational alerting can support this process, by prioritizing and formatting information to match the operational context. A number of modern flight deck systems are evaluated on how they support alerting in an operational ready format. From the comparison we can conclude, that there is a trend towards operational alerting, especially on a tactical level