A Comparison of Three Attitude Display Symbology Structures during an Attitude Maintenance Task

Abstract

The present study evaluated a new aircraft attitude display concept. The new symbology format, or Theta display, was developed by integrating the features of the conventional attitude/direction indicator (ADI) and head-up attitude reference display (HUD) into a single format. Number of trials to reach a specific performance criterion and tracking performance were collected as dependent variables on an attitude maintenance task. The results show that performance and training time were better with both the Theta display and the ADI than with the HUD. The findings support the hypothesis that an attitude display formed of the integration of ADI and HUD symbology will demonstrate a performance benefit over a pure HUD format.