Primary Flight Display Research Articles

Future flight deck design: Developing an innovative touchscreen inceptor combined with the primary flight display

The touchscreen has the potential to optimize the space usage and efficiency of the flight deck. Currently, touchscreens can combine the input and output functions of different systems. However, it does not yet serve as an inceptor to replace the sidestick or control column for aircraft manoeuvres. This study aims to examine the potential of a touchscreen as a flight inceptor compared with a traditional sidestick and gamepad. This research recruited 72 participants who interacted with three inceptors for both an instrument landing with disturbance and without disturbance using the Future System Simulator. The findings demonstrated that pilot performance, system usability and pilots’ situation awareness of touchscreen inceptors were significantly inferior to those of traditional sidesticks and gamepads. Compared to the sidestick and gamepad, the touchscreen provided a poorer situation awareness with the highest supply and demand. In addition, the performance of all inceptors was significantly influenced by disturbance. There is still a long way to go for certification of a touchscreen as an inceptor on the future flight deck. This research showed that even though the touchscreen inceptor scored the lowest on both SUS and SART, the majority of pilots agreed that the touchscreen inceptor provided a better attentional supply in challenging disturbance circumstances, providing proof of concept for its possible inclusion in flight deck design. There is a potential that the emerging touchscreen as an inceptor may develop further along with human-system integration flight deck design.

Mechanical Device or Touchscreen Widget: The Effects of Input Device and Task Size on Data Entry on the Primary Flight Display

Due to their customizability, touchscreens continue to advance as a device of choice when designing aircraft cockpits. Previous studies investigated the effect of turbulence on human performance when using touchscreens, but few have evaluated its performance for realistic aviation-specific tasks. In this study, we compared four touchscreen widgets and three mechanical devices during realistic data input on a primary flight display (PFD). Twenty participants took part in the experiment at a constant level of vibration, while simultaneously completing a secondary tracking task. Results indicated that virtual keypads lead to faster completion time for medium to large changes while keeping error rates low. Rotary knobs were fastest for small changes. Virtual keypads also had lower workload and discomfort compared to rotary knobs and drag-based widgets. We found the completion time to be the most important factor in tracking task performance, which translated in higher precision for keypads. These findings suggest that virtual keypads represent an efficient and secure option for numerical data input at low-to-medium vibration.

Supplementing Haptic Feedback in Flight Envelope Protection Through Visual Display Indications

Haptic cues on the side stick are a promising method to reduce loss of control in-flight incidents. They can be intuitively interpreted and provide immediate support, leading to a shared control system. However, haptic interfaces are limited in providing information, and the reason for cues may not always be clear to pilots. This study presents the results of the conceptual development of visual display symbology that supports haptic feedback on the side stick in communicating flight envelope boundaries to pilots. Novel indications for the limits of airspeed, load factor, angle of attack, and angle of bank, which for the first time simultaneously indicate magnitude and direction of the haptic cues, were integrated in an Airbus primary flight display. The symbology was tested in a pilot-in-the-loop experiment with professional Airbus pilots () flying several approaches in alternate law with haptic feedback. Objective results do not show clear improvements, although the time spent outside the flight envelope is slightly reduced. Subjective results indicate a preference, however, for the new display and an increased understanding of the haptic feedback. Further research is recommended to improve the interface design, remove unused indications, and test a bank scenario using current operational bank limits.

A New Interface to Cope With Unreliable Airspeed Indications

Abstract. When unreliable airspeed events occur, the pilot flying (PF) is required to fly the aircraft using the thrust and the pitch parameters that are displayed in two distanced locations of the flight deck. The Sycopaero interface was designed to limit the PF’s workload by automatically displaying thrust and pitch values specific to aircraft configuration on the primary flight display. Participants performed a simulated flight scenario in which they lost airspeed information during take-off with and without the Sycopaero interface. Both behavioral and ocular results demonstrate that the Sycopaero interface significantly lowers the mental workload of PFs and improves their monitoring performance. Taken together, these results suggest that the Sycopaero interface may be a suitable solution to safely handle airspeed failures.

Low Cost Avionics System for Ultralight Aircraft

Abstract The article presents a low cost avionics system for ultralight aircraft and paraplanes. The system contains Attitude and Heading Reference System, Air Data Computer and Primary Flight Display. Communication between units is via Wi-Fi. In the article design description was presented, as well as laboratory tests results. They are promising and the system is ready for in flight testing.

Aviate, Navigate: Functional Visualizations of Asymmetric Flight Envelope Limits

Current aircraft flight deck interfaces do not provide information on how a performance-altering failure constrains an aircraft’s flight envelope. As a result, it is difficult for flight crews to plan maneuvers in order to reach navigation targets. This study presents the results of the conceptual development of constraint-based interface symbology that aims to address this issue. The proposed symbology is designed to integrate with both the primary flight display and navigation display. A small-scale, pilot-in-the-loop experiment () was conducted to assess the effectiveness of the used symbology in terms of flight performance and pilot usability. A simplified dynamic model with an asymmetric flight envelope was used to purposefully manipulate various levels of damage severity and corresponding flight envelopes. Results show that although the modifications to the primary flight display generally did not show statistically significant improvements, presenting flight envelope constraints as a reachable navigation envelope on the navigation display generally did do so for severe failures. The visualized envelope occasionally resulted in improved tactical control decisions at reduced workload levels. A future study involving a lager sample size and increased simulation realism should substantiate the discovered results.

Application of in-house software to improve the design process of multifunctional aircraft indicators and control panels

The process of frame development for Multipurpose Control and Display Unit (MCDU), Multi-Function Display (MFD), and Primary Flight Display (PFD) involves a significant documentation effort and must produce consistent interface at the early design stages. We developed a formal description of the interface, including the interaction vocabulary, as well as custom software to simplify these tasks and improve the overall design quality. The software builds a model of the human-machine interface and uses it to automatically generate frame specification/documentation. This methodology and the software are currently used in several commercial projects.

Mitigation of Biodynamic Feedthrough for Touchscreens on the Flight Deck

ABSTRACT Biodynamic feedthrough (BDFT) is a key issue for touchscreen operations on the future flight deck, as cockpit accelerations due to turbulence leave pilots vulnerable to erroneous touches that disrupt task performance. This research focuses on the implementation of a software-based cancellation approach to mitigate the adverse effects of BDFT in touchscreen dragging tasks. A flight-simulator experiment with 18 participants was performed to estimate models of BDFT dynamics for horizontal and vertical touch-inputs on a primary flight display. The averaged BDFT models were used to cancel BDFT in the same continuous dragging task used for model identification and a discrete point-to-point dragging task. While for the continuous task the cancellation enabled 63% mitigation in BDFT, the same cancellation was ineffective for the discrete task, due to reduced BDFT susceptibility. Overall, the results show that while model-based BDFT cancellation can be highly effective, a key technical challenge will be ensuring it is sufficiently task-adaptive.

Testing cockpit display systems of aircraft using a model-based approach

Avionics are highly critical systems that require extensive testing to comply with international safety standards. Cockpit display systems (CDS) are a mandatory part of modern cockpits of both manned and unmanned aircraft. The information from various avionics components is displayed on CDS using a variety of flight instruments. An important part of testing avionics systems is to evaluate whether the displayed information on the CDS is correct or not. A common industrial practice is to manually test CDS, which is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and error-prone. In this paper, we propose a model-based approach to automate the CDS testing of aircraft. The proposed approach tests the CDS at two levels: (i) at the system level to verify that the CDS are working correctly and (ii) at system integration level of CDS when these are integrated with various avionics components. As a part of our approach, we develop a UML profile to model various elements of the CDS. The models are then used to support the automated testing process. We evaluate our approach on two industrial case studies, the first case study represents a primary flight display (PFD) of an aircraft and the second one is the CDS of the ground control station (GCS-CDS) of an unmanned aerial vehicle. The evaluation results show that three potential faults are identified in the PFD and four major faults are found in the GCS-CDS.

Augmented visualization cues on primary flight display facilitating pilot's monitoring performance

• The incompatible human-computer interaction in the flight deck can lead to accident/incident. • Flight deck designs have to provide higher level of situation awareness by instinctively matching pilot's cognitive processes. • Salient visual cues can reduce pilot's cognitive effort to eliminating the requirements of text-reading on the interface displays. • The key concept behind augmented design is to merge the flight mode annunciator with raw flight data in the cockpit. • Augmented visualization cues can facilitate pilots identifying the flight status quicker and more accurate compared with traditional design. There have been many aviation accidents and incidents related to mode confusion on the flight deck. The aim of this research is to evaluate human-computer interactions on a newly designed augmented visualization Primary Flight Display (PFD) compared with the traditional design of PFD. Based on statistical analysis of 20 participants interaction with the system, there are significant differences on pilots' pupil dilation, fixation duration, fixation counts and mental demand between the traditional PFD design and augmented PFD. The results demonstrated that augmented visualisation PFD, which uses a green border around the “raw data” of airspeed, altitude or heading indications to highlight activated mode changes, can significantly enhance pilots' situation awareness and decrease perceived workload. Pilots can identify the status of flight modes more easily, rapidly and accurately compared to the traditional PFD, thus shortening the response time on cognitive information processing. This could also be the reason why fixation durations on augmented PFDs were significantly shorter than traditional PFDs. The augmented visualization in the flight deck improves pilots' situation awareness as indicated by increased fixation counts related to attention distribution. Simply highlighting the parameters on the PFD with a green border in association with relevant flight mode changes will greatly reduce pilots' perceived workload and increase situation awareness. Flight deck design must focus on methods to provide pilots with enhanced situation awareness, thus decreasing cognitive processing requirements by providing intuitive understanding in time limited situations.

A Comparative Study Installation Arrangement of Primary Flight Display (PFD) in the Flight Deck’s Regional Passenger Transport Aircraft

The Flight Deck or cockpit is designed to support the prosecution of aircraft mission. For aircraft with commercial purpose such as passenger transport aircraft, there must be good “fit” between the human, the machine which composed of various aircraft system and the aircraft mission; and these are what the Flight Deck design process needs to ensure but not limited to display design, aircraft control, automation, HCI on the Flight Deck and pilot’s view to outside through cockpit windows namely external vision. The external vision of cockpit windows must satisfy regulatory requirements which intended to ensure that the view is adequate for pilots to operate the aircraft safely and gives them a reasonable opportunity to see and avoid other aircraft that pose a collision threat.Concurrently during critical periods of flight, it is important that the flight crew access information in front of his view with minimal head rotation. Cockpit-Displays with critical flight information should then be located to these locations. Compromising both external vision and internal vision as Pilot’s visibility should be attained.

Pilots' Fixation Patterns During Taxiing and the Effects of Visibility.

INTRODUCTION: Visual performance is important for safe and accurate taxiing operations. Visibility is associated with navigation errors during taxiing. The main objective of the present study was to investigate the effects of visibility on pilots' fixation patterns during taxiing. The interaction between visibility and flight experience was also examined.METHODS: Both experienced and less experienced pilots participated in the study. They were instructed to perform simulated taxiing tasks in two visibility conditions: clear day vs. low visibility. A mixed-model analysis of variance was performed to determine the main and interaction effects of 'visibility' and 'flight experience' on fixation data in each area of interest (AOI).RESULTS: The results showed that experienced pilots' fixation counts reduced on the electronic centralized aircraft monitoring (ECAM) area, but increased out the middle view (OTWM) and right view out of the window (OTWR) in low visibility than in clear day, while fixation counts among less experienced pilots increased on the primary flight display (PFD) and ECAM areas, but did not change significantly OTWM and OTWR in low visibility. Fixation duration increased by 59.8%, 9.8%, and 7.9% in ECAM, OTWL, and OTWR, respectively, in low visibility than in clear day.CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that pilots pay more attention and have higher perceptual load in the low visibility condition to maintain taxiing accuracy, and more experienced pilots make more visual efforts to extract information from AOIs outside the cockpit in the low visibility condition. These findings provide practical implications for safe and accurate taxiing operations.Zhang X, Qu X, Xue H, Liu J. Pilots' fixation patterns during taxiing and the effects of visibility. Aerosp Med Hum Perform. 2019; 90(6):546-552.

Design of a Primary Flight Display to Avoid Decelerating Below the Minimum Safe Operating Speed

Abstract. Analysis of recent airliner accidents and incidents identified a class of events in which structurally, mechanically, and electronically sound aircraft decelerated through the minimum safe operating speed for the phase of flight to the stick-shaker activation speed. Despite the differences in the sequences of events, a subset of the incidents and accidents had one thing in common – the automation was no longer actively controlling to the airspeed target. This article describes the accident scenarios and design of a modification to the airspeed tape on the primary flight display to explicitly annunciate the absence of active speed control. An experiment to evaluate the efficacy of the enhanced airspeed tape showed faster pilot response time but no differences in correct pilot response.

Attitude Indicator Design in Primary Flight Display: Revisiting an Old Issue With Current Technology

ABSTRACTObjective: The experiments investigated the “old issue” of the attitude indicator’s moving-horizon versus moving-aircraft format with current primary flight display technology. Of interest was whether the effects found in earlier studies, favoring the moving-aircraft format, could be replicated with most recent technology including extended horizon displays, which depict the artificial horizon extended over the whole screen with overlaying speed and altitude scales (e.g., B787).Background: Although the moving-horizon format represents the standard approach in Western aviation, human factors research from the 1950s to the 1970s with round electromechanical instruments favored the moving-aircraft format with respect to better support of flight-path tracking and unusual attitude recoveries. However, recent studies using laboratory displays more similar to modern primary flight displays provided inconsistent results. This led to the assumption that the display’s design is a moderating factor of those effects.Method: Thirty-two novices and 13 pilots flew several tracking and recovery tasks in a PC-based simulator equipped with moving-horizon and moving-aircraft formats in classic and extended horizon design.Results: The data show that the previous effects favoring a moving-aircraft format of displaying bank information can be replicated with current primary flight display designs. However, the extended horizon design seems to reduce this effect, at least for pilots.Conclusion: The results suggest reconsidering the format of the attitude indicator at least for new applications, such as control of remotely piloted aircraft.

Design of a Novel Multifunction Decision Support Display for Anesthesia Care: AlertWatch\xae OR

BackgroundThis paper describes the design of a multifunction alerting display for intraoperative anesthetic care. The design was inspired by the multifunction primary flight display used in modern aviation.ResultsThe display retrieves live data from multiple sources; the physiologic monitors, the anesthesia information management system, the laboratory values and comorbidities from patient’s problem summary list, medical history or history & physical. This information is integrated into a display composed of readily identifiable icons of organ systems, which are color coded to signify normal range, marginal range, abnormal range (by green, yellow, red respectively) and orange outlines for comorbidities/risk factors. There are dozens of text alerts, which can be presented as black text (informational), red text (important information) and red scrolling text (highest importance information). The alerts are derived from current standards in the literature and some involve complex calculations being conducted in the background.ConclusionsThe goal of such a system is to improve the quality and safety of anesthetic care by providing enhanced situational awareness in a fashion analogous to the “glass cockpit” and its primary flight display which has improved aviation safety.

Instrument Failure, Stress, and Spatial Disorientation Leading to a Fatal Crash With a Large Aircraft.

An aircraft's orientation relative to the ground cannot be perceived via the sense of balance or the somatosensory system. When devoid of external visual references, the pilot must rely on instruments. A sudden unexpected instrument indication is a challenge to the pilot, who might have to question the instrument instead of responding with the controls. In this case report we analyze, from a human-factors perspective, how a limited instrument failure led to a fatal accident. During straight-ahead level flight in darkness, at 33,000 ft, the commander of a civil cargo airplane was suddenly confronted by an erroneous pitch-up indication on his primary flight display. He responded by pushing the control column forward, making a bunt maneuver with reduced/negative Gz during approximately 15 s. The pilots did not communicate rationally or cross-check instruments. Recordings of elevator and aileron positions suggest that the commander made intense efforts to correct for several extreme and erroneous roll and pitch indications. Gz displayed an increasing trend with rapid fluctuations and peaks of approximately 3 G. After 50 s the aircraft entered a turn with decreasing radius and finally hit the ground in an inverted attitude. A precipitate maneuvring response can, even if occurring in a large aircraft at high altitude, result in a seemingly inexorable course of events, ending with a crash. In the present case both pilots were probably incapacitated by acute psychological stress and spatial disorientation. Intense variations in Gz may have impaired the copilot's reading of the functioning primary flight display.Tribukait A, Eiken O. Instrument failure, stress, and spatial disorientation leading to a fatal crash with a large aircraft. Aerosp Med Hum Perform. 2017; 88(11):1043-1048.

Piloted Simulator Evaluation of Safe Flight Envelope Display Indicators for Loss of Control Avoidance

In recent studies, it has been observed that loss of control in flight is the most frequent primary cause of accidents. One of the technologies that will significantly reduce the risk of loss of control accidents is onboard safe flight envelope estimation. An efficient method for estimating the safe flight envelope for impaired aircraft has been implemented and evaluated in piloted simulations. This modular method is based on a physical approach. The aerodynamic system parameters are estimated from realistic noisy sensor measurements based on a probabilistic approach. These parameters are then used for efficient model-based computations of the trim envelope as a set of equilibrium points that can be attained by means of admissible inputs. The safe maneuverability limitations are extended beyond the trim envelope through a robust reachability analysis derived from an optimal control formulation. These trim and maneuvering envelope limits can be used for multiple purposes. For example, they can be conveyed to the flight crew in an intuitive way by incorporating this information in the primary flight display. These display features have been evaluated in the Advanced Concepts Flight Simulator at Ames Research Center as part of a larger research initiative. Commercial airline crews flew multiple challenging approach and landing scenarios in a relevant environment. Results show that the additional display features contribute significantly to flight crew awareness and avoiding loss of control in flight.

Generation of Symbols on Primary Flight Display and Its Validation under Host Environment

The aim of this paper is to develop the symbols (graphical view of flight indicators) of Primary Flight Display page at the host environment and to validate the symbols using GUI (Graphical User Interface) at run time. The symbols of these indicators can be developed using OpenGL libraries which gives no compatibility problems at the target system (Helicopter). With the support of these libraries, the symbols for the indicators can be developed. In the host environment, the data required for the symbols of flight indicators can be given manually by the developer at the compile time or at the run time using GUI. Based on the given data, symbols can be displayed and the developer can check the correctness of the symbols. The process of giving data (periodic data) to the program at the compile time and at the run time can be compared with each other. The method of initialising the structures at the compile time increases the number of times the program being executed. So the GUI is developed with all the required controls which can receive all the valid and invalid constant values at run time. It reduces the number of executions of the program. Thus improves the validation efficiency. With the support of developed GUI, the program can be executed for one time the symbols on OpenGL window can be validated against all the valid and invalid values. Thus improves the efficiency of validating the correctness of symbols by the developer. This process can be applied in the development and validation of other pages of IADS (Integrated Architecture and Display System).

Flight-Deck Surface Trajectory-Based Operations

The results of three piloted simulations investigating flight-deck surface trajectory-based operations (STBO) are presented. Commercial transport pilots were given taxi clearances with time and speed components on the primary flight display and were required to taxi to the departing runway or intermediate intersections. Results show that when pilots were provided with speed-only taxi clearances, pilots either had poor required time of arrival (RTA) conformance with acceptable estimates of attentional distribution and safety, or had good RTA conformance with unacceptable attentional distribution and safety estimates. A flight-deck error-nulling algorithm/display allowed pilots to conform accurately with taxi RTA clearances while maintaining safety. Results are discussed in terms of pilot multitasking in the busy airport surface operations environment.

Cockpit Display System Simulation of General Aviation Aircraft Based on VAPS XT

This paper introduces a recent study of Cockpit Display System (CDS) simulation for general aviation aircraft. The cockpit display simulation system is developed for avionics system integration and test by using VAPS XT software. This paper describes the cycle of developing human-machine interfaces (HMI) with VAPS XT, designs the Primary Flight Display (PFD) and Multi-functional Display (MFD) interfaces based on system requirements, and analyzes key technologies in the simulation process. The simulation result is proved to have good real-time effect and high fidelity and the simulation system has gained favorable effects in the exploitation of a practical avionics project.