Ecological Approach to Support Pilot Terrain Awareness After Total Engine Failure

Abstract

Terrain awareness enhancing avionics, such as Synthetic Vision Systems and the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System, have been developed to reduce the number of controlled flight into terrain accidents. The protection these systems offer, however, is far from optimal. Synthetic Vision Systems only provide pilots with perceptual data, and leave all cognition and interpretation of data to the pilot. With Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning Systems the opposite is true. Here, cognition is hidden in the system and pilots are confronted with compelling advisories and commands. This paper presents a display system, the Emergency Landing Guidance System, which visualizes the functional meaning of surrounding terrain, adopting an ecological interface design approach. The potential benefits of this approach are demonstrated with the case of locating and approaching a suitable landing spot in the situation of a sudden complete engine failure. To evaluate the amount of pilot terrain awareness supported by the new display, an experiment was conducted in a fixed-base flight simulator. Results show that the new display supports pilot terrain awareness much better than present terrain avoidance systems, especially regarding awareness involving the higher levels of cognitive processing. Pilots better understand the meaning of the terrain topology in relation to their goals and constraints.

Designing for Situation Awareness - Aviation Perspective

“…Examples are a Total Energy management display for basic aircraft symmetrical flight control, that enables pilots to understand and act on exchanging their aircraft potential and kinetic energy , Separation Assistance displays that allow pilots to better understand and act on other traffic Ellerbroek et al, 2011;Ellerbroek et al, 2013b;Ellerbroek et al, 2013a), an ecological Synthetic Vision display (Borst et al, 2006;Borst et al, 2008;Borst et al, 2010), and a display to work on fourdimensional aircraft trajectories Van Marwijk et al, 2011) We also explored various EID designs for air traffic controllers in current and future air traffic management environments (Tielrooij et al, 2010;Klomp et al, 2011;Van der Eijk et al, 2012;De Leege et al, 2013;Van Paassen et al, 2013;Klomp et al, 2016), and controllers of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (Fuchs et al, 2014).…”

Design of an airborne three-dimensional separation assistance display

“…Along the vertical axis, commonly five levels represent the workspace at decreasing levels of abstraction, starting at the top with the purpose(s) for which the system was designed, all the way down to the spatial topology, properties, and appearance of the components that make up the system on the bottom level [40], [44]. In previous studies on a workspace analysis for the air transport domain, it showed that dividing the horizontal dimension of the AH between items "internal", and "external" to the ownship, provides a logical structure for an abstraction hierarchy that describes this domain [35], [36], [45]. Fig.…”

“…The total amount of energy is determined by the throttle, whereas the elevator is used to control the exchange of kinetic and potential energy. The total energy state of an aircraft essentially determines the affordances for maneuvering in terms of speed and altitude [34], [36]. Together, these internal constraints determine the part of the airspace that is reachable within a certain timespan.…”

Towards Integrating Traffic and Terrain Constraints into a Vertical Situation Display

“…The VSAD. In this figure, 1 is the own aircraft symbol, 2 is the speed indicator, 3 is the vertical speed indicator, 4 is the conflict geometry overlay, 5 is the own speed vector, 6 shows the intruder aircraft with a flight label, 7 shows the own aircraft programmed flight path and 8 is the performance envelope overlay, transformed to the five minutes time interval.…”