Interface design on cabin pressurization system affecting pilot's situation awareness: the comparison between digital displays and pointed displays

Abstract

The fundamental approach to improve pilots’ situation awareness would be to reorganise and restructure the presentation of information to fit pilot’s cognitive model on the flight deck. This would facilitate pilots’ perception, understanding, and projection hence making it easier to find the relevant targets. Sixty pilots (30 B-737 pilots; 30 B-777 pilots) participated in this research to investigate pilots’ situation awareness while interacting with digital displays and moving pointed needle displays on cabin pressurization system. The results have shown significant differences on pilots’ perception, understanding and overall situation awareness between digital display and pointed display on the flight deck. Pilots significantly preferred the digital design Cabin Pressurization System which is consistent with the proximity compatibility principle, and the position of the display on the centre instrument panel is easily accessible to both pilots and does not require large head movements. There are some recommendations on the cabin pressurization design including the size of outflow valve position indicator which should be significantly increased to provided saliency of information; colour coding should be used on cabin altitude and differential pressure indicator to mark critical cabin altitude; and standard operating procedures shall include cabin altitude and differential pressure reading by pilot monitoring. The final and completed solution to the issues on the cabin pressurization system is to redesign the scattered pointed displays as integrated digital displays to fit the human-centred principle.