Article
Effects of Air Route Alternation and Display Design on an
Operator’s Situation Awareness, Task Performance and
Mental Workload in Simulated Flight Tasks
Hao Chen
1
, Liping Pang
1
, Xiaoru Wanyan
1,
*, Shuang Liu
1
, Yufeng Fang
1,2
and Da Tao
3
Citation: Chen, H.; Pang, L.;
Wanyan, X.; Liu, S.; Fang, Y.; Tao, D.
Effects of Air Route Alternation and
Display Design on an Operator’s
Situation Awareness, Task Performance
and Mental Workload in Simulated
Flight Tasks. Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 5745.
https://doi.org/10.3390/app11125745
Academic Editor: Rosario Pecora
Received: 17 May 2021
Accepted: 18 June 2021
Published: 21 June 2021
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4.0/).
1
School of Aeronautic Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China;
beihangchenhao@buaa.edu.cn (H.C.); pangliping@buaa.edu.cn (L.P.); liushuangbh@buaa.edu.cn (S.L.);
buaa_ergonomics@163.com (Y.F.)
2
Aviation Industry Corporation of China, Ltd., Beijing 100028, China
3
Institute of Human Factors and Ergonomics, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China;
taoda@szu.edu.cn
* Correspondence: wanyanxiaoru@buaa.edu.cn; Tel.: +86-132-6026-9679
Featured Application: A potential application of this work is to provide a theoretical basis and
experimental data for the principles of improving a pilot’s task performance and adaptive display
design under the conditions of critical situations, such as air route alternation.
Abstract:
Air route alternation caused by unexpected events in abnormal or emergency situations
often produces adverse consequences on an operator’s cognition and behavior in flight tasks. Under
such a circumstance, it is especially necessary to examine the utility of the interaction displays usually
designed based on the routine environment. This study was aimed to investigate the effects of air
route alternation and display design on operators’ situation awareness (SA), task performance and
mental workload during simulated flight tasks. Twenty-four participants attended an experiment
where they were instructed to perform simulated flight tasks with three types of display designs
in both air-route-as-planned and air-route-altered conditions. Subjective measures, behavioral
measures and eye movement measures were adopted to assess the participants’ SA, task performance
and mental workload. The results show that unexpected air route alternation increases mental
workload as well as deteriorates the SA and task performance due to the gap between attention
resource demand and supply. Reducing the demand of the operator’s attention resource should
be the focus when coping with unexpected events in abnormal situations. In addition, reasonable
information layout, such as a center-layout design of the critical decision-making information, is
more important than information salience for improving the SA and task performance in abnormal
situations. Nevertheless, indicators with a high-salience design, such as a more open window design
and immersive design, are still worth recommending.
Keywords:
air route alternation; display design; situation awareness; task performance; mental
workload; abnormal situation; unexpected events; aviation safety
1. Introduction
Situation awareness (SA), which refers to information perception, comprehension
and projection [
1
], has long been considered as an important factor that influences flight
safety in aviation [
2
]. It also has been widely recognized as a critical indicator of workplace
safety
[3,4]
. Statistics showed that 70.8% of air accidents can be accounted for by human
errors, 88.2% of which are related to SA [
5
,
6
]. The lack of or decrease in SA is likely to
result in adverse consequences for flight safety, such as the occurrence of human errors,
performance deterioration and even air accidents [
7
–
9
]. For instance, one of the main
reasons for the Air France 447 crash in 2009 was the lack of SA during the pilots’ commu-
nication [
2
,
10
–
12
]. SA can be a significant concern, especially in abnormal environments,
Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 5745. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11125745 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/applsci
