Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 57th annual meeting

PDFProceedingsAir pilotsAeronautical chartsNavigation chartsExperimentsHuman factorsRadar clutterAccuracyUnited StatesHuman Factors and Ergonomics SocietyChandra, Divya CGrayhem, RebeccaJohn A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center (U.S.)United States. Federal Aviation AdministrationAGR-SAFETY AND SECURITY-SAFETY AND SECURITYNTL-AVIATION-Aviation Safety/AirworthinessNTL-AVIATION-Aviation Human FactorsNTL-SAFETY AND SECURITY-Aviation Safety/AirworthinessNTL-SAFETY AND SECURITY-Human FactorsVolpe National Transportation Systems Center, Technical Reference CenterPerformance based navigation supports the design of more precise flight procedures. However, these new procedures can be visually complex, which may impact the usability of charts that depict the procedures. The purpose of the study was to evaluate whether there are performance benefits from simplifying aeronautical charts that depict visually complex flight procedures by separating the procedures onto different chart images. Forty-seven professional pilots participated. They used high-fidelity current and modified charts to find specific information from approach and Standard Instrument Departure (SID) chart images that were shown one at a time on a computer monitor. Response time and accuracy were recorded. Results show a consistent and significant reduction in the time to find information from the simplified chart images. Response time varied linearly with a simple clutter metric, the sum of visual elements in the depiction, indicating serial visual search. Most questions were answered with high accuracy, but some questions about altitude constraints yielded low accuracies