Use of touch screen display applications for aircraft flight control

Touch screen technology is rapidly and progressively entering the world of commercial avionics and being introduced inside the cockpit. This paper presents the main results of a piloted experiment conducted by the Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR) as part of the ACROSS (Advanced Cockpit for Reduction Of StreSs and workload) project of the EU's 7th Frame Work Programme, see www.across-fp7.eu. The experiment focused on the use of novel touch screen applications in the cockpit of civil transport aircraft and investigated the potential for (peak-) workload reduction. Three different touch screen applications and associated experimental results will be discussed. Firstly the so-called tactical flight control operations of an aircraft is addressed, like changing the aircraft's speed, heading, altitude, flight level or vertical speed. Secondly a novel late runway change functionality was set up for supporting the crew decision to accept a new landing runway late in the approach while still allowing safely and easily configuring the aircraft cockpit systems. Similarly the third new application allowed for a fast and easy alternate airport selection process and subsequently a new route creation and selection towards the alternate airport. A piloted experiment was held in which ten airline crews participated on NLR's full motion flight simulator (GRACE). Baseline formed today's aircraft operations without touch screen functionality. Subjective workload and situation awareness ratings were used, as well as objective eye-tracking measurements and time-analysis. Also the effect of turbulence (intensity) was investigated. Main results for the tactical flight control application showed further room for design improvements in the field of workload reduction, especially under more severe turbulence. For the other two cockpit touchscreen applications the results supported the conclusions that pilot workload decreased, situation awareness improved and task execution was much faster and easier compared to the baseline.