Pilotage Error and Residual Attention: The Evaluation of a Performance Control System in Airborne Area Navigation

摘要

In 1969, by specifically including 'pilotage error' in the error budget for area navigation system certification, the Federal Aviation Administration legally attached economic premiums and penalties to human as well as equipment performance in man-machine system design. To establish the accuracy of use and freedom from pilot blunders associated with systems employing various configurations of displays and controls requires both simulator and flight experimentation. An automatically adaptive cockpit side task provides a saturating level of pilot workload and allows the sensitive, orderly, and statistically reliable measurement of a pilot's residual attention as a common metric for navigation and control system assessment. A simulation experiment employing this measurement system compared pilot performances as a function of the number of waypoints that could be stored in an airborne area navigation (RNAV) computer (1, 2, 4, or 8) and the type of manual flight control system used (normal flight control versus maneuvering performance control). (Author Modified Abstract)