Information Organization in the Airline Cockpit

We describe the all-engine-out landing of Air Transat Flight 236 in the Azores Islands (August 24, 2001) and use certain aspects of that accident to motivate a conceptual framework for the organization and display of information in complex human-interactive systems. Four hours into the flight, the aircraft experienced unusual oil indications. Two hours later, a fuel system failure led to a full-blown emergency that was not evident to the crew until it was too late. Although all relevant data to avoid the emergency were available to the aircraft computer systems, the design choices made about what to display and how to display it kept the pilots “in the dark.” The framework proposed here consists of six levels, beginning from the extraction of data from physical signals, abstracting from raw data to form visual representations on the user interface, and finally integrating high-level elements and information structures. We illustrate how the framework can be used to analyze some of the shortcomings in current display design, and we discuss some principles of information organization and formal analysis of task logic that might help to improve design. Finally, we sketch a design for a helicopter engine display based on these principles.