ISAP 2007 Panel
April 24th, 2007I just finished chairing a panel on Designing, Evaluating and Training Flight Decks of the Future at the International Symposium on Aviation Psychology in Dayton, Ohio. The title, although expansive, was meant to link together recent research on new flight deck designs, and address the training issues that have traditionally prevented innovation in aviation.
(Lately, the rage in the industry is “flight deck commonality,” meaning that cockpits are designed to be similar to each other, allowing pilots to be certified once for a whole range of aircraft. This reduces the training costs of an airline, but fosters a least-common-denominator approach to interface design, encouraging manufacturers to keep old, questionable interaction schemes.)
My panelists included Dr. Vic Riley, Carl Smith, and Dr. Deborah Boehm-Davis. Attendance was sparse at the start, but we quickly built up an audience and had a pretty productive session. Our time slot was right before lunch, which was good because a fair chunk of the audience chose to stick around to chat about our work.
Now, I can enjoy the rest of the conference.