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Quickened displays have a severe limitation in that they do not give any indication of status information, and therefore no indication of actual error. It was hypothesized in this study that a display with both quickened and status information would enable the operator to make more effective control responses than either a status alone display, or a quickened alone display. A horizontal axis pursuit tracking task was developed and controlled by eighteen participants with three display types: (1) a status alone display; (2) a quickened alone display; and (3) a status and quickened combined display. The primary hypothesis was only partly accepted. The results indicated that after two minutes tracking time the combined and quickened displays give the best performance, with worse performance from the status display. After ten minutes tracking time the combined display was the best, followed by the status display and the quickened display. The study concluded that the use of a combined display did yield superior performance for the tracking task devised. The effectiveness of the combined display relative to the quickened display or the status display was, however, a function of practice time.

This study was founded on the premise that airplane cockpit operations, while generally safe and relatively efficient, can be made even more so by employing instrument displays which are potentially more intuitive than existing displays. A low fidelity flight simulator was used to conduct an experiment comparing the performance of twenty-four instrument rated pilot subjects on a two axis tracking task (an Instrument Landing System Approach) under three instrument display conditions: (1) conventional instruments (INST); (2) a Pathway-in-the-Sky (PITS) display; and (3) a combination of the two (BOTH). The primary hypothesis, that pilot performance using the PITS and BOTH display configurations would be more accurate than when using conventional instruments, was accepted. The results indicated that no significant difference existed between performance under the PITS and BOTH conditions; however, performance was significantly better under either the PITS or BOTH conditions than under the INST condition. The study concluded that use of the PITS and BOTH displays yielded superior performance on the tracking task, and that if performance on the low-fidelity flight simulator is ever at all a predictor of performance in an actual aircraft, then the PITS and BOTH displays might yield superior performance in actual flight, potentially resulting in safer instrument flight operations.

"Based on previous research findings in the expert/novice area, this thesis suggests that how people approach and solve problems largely depend on their experience level. [snip] The purpose of this study was to evaluate if the proposed format of the ICIS will effect performance of novice pilot's as compared experienced pilots."--Leaf iv.

This study was the second of two studies to evaluate the use of a pseudo threedimensional display to present information about future possible conflicts. The purpose of this study was to evaluate variations of a cockpit screen display that transfers relevant data to the pilot in a manner which is easy to interpret and to facilitate the possible stressful situations that may be encountered due to the proposed free flight environment. In the first phase, three display concepts, using three different screen designs were compared. In this study, three different displays, all of which used using the space-time predictor concept developed in the previous study, were compared for utility and acceptability. Eighteen pilots were tested. The results support the Pilot's perspective display (from the previous study) as the most effective display for conflict avoidance. The results also highlighted some areas of concern that are discussed.

This study evaluated the effects that heads-up mounted TCAS displays had on pilot response and workload. Pilot response was evaluated by: (a) response time to a traffic advisory, and (b) number of missed traffic alerts. Workload assessment was accomplished in accordance with NASA's Task Load Index (TLX). Subjects were all licensed pilots with a minimum of a private pilot license and an instrument rating. A total of 32 subjects were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups utilizing HUD-mounted, and conventional, TCAS displays respectively. Performance data was collected during computer-simulated flights, while subjective workload levels were reported at the end. It was found that HUD-mounted TCAS displays yielded better performance results (p=0.05), while resulting in significantly less workload.

"The purpose of this study was to investigate the performance effects of adding an additional sound cue characteristic to a 3-D auditory display sound stimulus to increase localization accuracy. [snip] In the study conducted, a highpass filter addition or a lowpass filter addition was compared to a "normal" condition for both the front and back locations."--Leaf iv.