Evaluating Boeing’s Flight Deck of the Future
October 20th, 2006
Most people don’t know that modern airliners run on autopilot almost all the time. In fact, newer planes are technically capable of completing an entire flight with almost no input from humans.
Sadly, the interfaces that control these incredibly complicated automated flight computers date back to the 1970’s, and many important human factors studies have uncovered serious usability problems (ie, Sarter & Woods, 1995; Sherry et al, 2002).
In fact, some of these problems were so serious that Airbus had to release emergency fixes to their aircraft after hundreds of people died in a string of notorious interface-related crashes.
My advisor and I, at George Mason University, teamed up with an R&D group at Boeing Commercial Airplanes to help them evaluate new prototype flight deck interfaces designed to fix these kinds of problems. In one study of the new interfaces, we found statistically significant performance improvements of up to 100% for certain tasks.
Current Generation Panel
Boeing’s Flight Deck of the Future (from Prada, et al, 2006)
From a safety perspective, this work is very rewarding. From a technical perspective, it embodies some of the most serious challenges facing Human Computer Interaction. How do we compare drastically different systems? How do we define tasks without confounding them with the requirements of the tools? And how can we predict performance without going through expensive user testing every single time a design question comes up? I won’t go into the answers now, but I have some papers published and in preparation that try to tackle these issues.
Applied psychologists have been studying human system interaction problems in aircraft for nearly a hundred years. I was fortunate enough to be among those who were able to work directly on the solutions. As the project has gained recognition, we’ve started collaborating with some other groups, including teams at NASA, the University of Colorado, and Carnegie Mellon. Eventually, Boeing hired me as a contractor to support the Flight Deck team while I finished my dissertation.
If you’d like to read technical reports describing this work, check out my curriculum vitae.