Analysis of Ease-of-Use and Ease-of-Learning of a Modern Flight Management System

Abstract

The Flight Management System (FMS) has been identified by researchers, airline pilots, and airline instructors as hard to learn and difficult to use. Using the FMS to execute airline missiontasksrequiresthedevelopmentandmaintenanceofapilot’scognitiveskillstointeract with the FMS user-interface. This cognition is guided by visual cues (e.g. labels, prompts), user-interfaceconventions,andmemorizedactionsequences.Pilotactionspromptedbyvisual cues on the user-interface take less time to learn and reduce the likelihood of errors while performing infrequent tasks in revenue-service operations. The analysis described in this paper identified the presence of visual cues to completely guide all pilot actions for twenty five percent (25%) of 102 airline mission tasks performed using a modern FMS. Further, forty-five percent (45%) of the tasks were identified as occurring infrequently and were not completely supported by salient visual cues. The low percentage of tasks supported entirely by visual cues contributes to pilots perceptions about the difficulty in learning and using the FMS. Implications for training the FMS and the design of improved user-interfaces are discussed.