Empirical Evaluations of Pilot Planning Behavior in Emergency Situations

Abstract

Faced with an emergency aboard an aircraft, pilots must generate a flight-plan to effectively and safely guide the plane to touchdown. However, forming a safe flight-plan is a complex and difficult task. An initial experiment hypothesized that an in-flight planning tool would aid the pilot in forming and verifying flight-plans. Results identified problems with the planner's interface, highlighted the myriad concerns that pilots must address in creating an emergency flight plan, and identified potential benefits with having the system provide a safe plan. Two further studies are discussed in this paper. The first examined whether the pilots' difficulties came from specific features in the interface or from the inherent difficulty of the task. The second study evaluated pilots' ability to quickly judge the accuracy of an automatically-generated plan.