Spatial Awareness Comparisons Between Large-Screen, Integrated Pictorial Displays and Conventional EFIS Displays During Simulated Landing Approaches

Abstract

This paper focuses on large-screen, integrated pictorial displays as an approach to synthetic vision technology and on optimizing crew spatial awareness. To understand situation awareness (SA) in civil transport operations, a definition is necessary. Regal, Rogers, and Boucek (ref. 8) state that SA implies "that the pilot has an integrated understanding of the factors that will contribute to the safe flying of the aircraft under normal or non-normal conditions." As SA increases, "the pilot is increasingly able to `think ahead of the aircraft,' and ...dothis for a wider variety of situations." This anticipation entails "a knowledge of present states, future goals, and the procedures used to get from one to the other." Regal, Rogers, and Boucek go on to expound that, for the commercial pilot, another dimension of SA involves the individual components. One of the more important of these components is spatial awareness, which in this paper involves knowledge of the own ship position relative to the desired flight route, the runway, and the other traffic. The objective of the investigation reported herein was to evaluate and compare the spatial awareness component of pilots using displays representative EFIS w/o flight directo