Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast/Cockpit Display of Traffic Information: Innovations in Aircraft Navigation on the Airport Surface

摘要

In 2000, the FAA s Office of Runway Safety made a concerted effort to reduce runway incursions. The Safe Flight 21 Program awarded contracts for CDTI avionics development and an operational demonstration that included a surface moving-map capability. An operational evaluation was conducted in October 2000 to assess pilot use of varying types of CDTI devices and how surface-map information could aid pilot situation awareness when taxiing. Complex taxi routes were designed to examine how well pilots navigated their aircraft using an electronic surface-map display (north-up, track-up) or a paper surface map. This study was designed to determine how the use of these displays might aid situation awareness and influence operational communications. Pilots navigated their aircraft during 3 day and 2 night operations, resulting in 31 structured and 37 unstructured taxi routes. As subject-matter experts listened to 15 hours of audiotapes and read verbatim transcripts, they identified operational concerns and noted problems. Communications involved in progressive taxi routes and routes instructing pilots to follow another aircraft were excluded from analysis. A Type-of-Route x Type-of-Map ANOVA revealed that more problems occurred for structured, compared with unstructured taxi routes, and more messages were exchanged. A statistically significant interaction indicated that most problems occurred for the north-up map during structured taxi routes, and the number of problems encountered was comparable for the other maps when pilots navigated along unstructured taxi routes. When designing electronic surface-map displays, providing a north-up map orientation appears to create more problems than either track-up or paper surface maps especially when taxi routes are complex (or unfamiliar).