Dr Rachael Wynne

Commercial airline pilots are required to make efficient, justifiable, and safety-critical decisions when faced with adverse events such as engine failures. Although these are rare events, the consequences are severe, and the pilot response is critical. This paper reviews pilot decision-making when faced with a dual engine failure on take-off using three different decision models; the Recognition Primed Decision Model, Decision Ladders and the Perceptual Cycle Model. In-depth interviews with eight experienced airline pilots were conducted to capture their decision-making processes in response to a dual engine failure on take-off event. The analysis of these interviews using the three different decision models provide recommendations for a proposed decision assistant. The different decision models are discussed in relation to the insight they can bring to developing a future decision assistant tool within the flight deck of commercial aircraft.

This paper studies the use of touchscreen displays on the flight deck, focusing on the usability of touch interfaces to complete panning and numeric entry tasks. Results from this study show that the usability of a drag gesture to meet a pan function, surpasses the performance of a simple tapping interface under all turbulent conditions tested. Also, that this drag interface is more useable in an inter-seat flight deck position, than a central one. It was also found that touchscreen interfaces can surpass the performance of the traditional mechanical dial interface for numeric data entry tasks, under all turbulent conditions tested.

Driving is one of the most complex and dangerous tasks that is regularly performed by most adults. Whereas most research examines performance in novel situations, most everyday driving occurs in highly familiar settings, such as our daily commute. Here we compared drivers¿ hazard identification on familiar roads with similar but unfamiliar roads, for five road types: city streets, suburban streets, urban roads, mountain roads, and motorways. Participants were 45 experienced drivers with on average 17.6 years driving experience (SD = 5.2), and 32 novices with on average 6.2 months solo driving (SD = 3.5). Experienced drivers identified more hazards than novices, regardless of road type, but the magnitude of the effect was surprisingly small. The overall effect of location familiarity on hazard identification was not statistically significant, but there were significant effects of road type and significant interactions between familiarity and road type, which suggests researchers should be cautious when generalizing results obtained from one road context to another.

Road traffic injuries remain a leading cause of death worldwide, especially for individuals aged 15-29 years. The ability to perceive and respond appropriately to hazards while driving is closely related to driving experience and schemata. Although many studies focus on differences between novice and experienced drivers, the learner driver population is often under-represented. In this paper we present stage one of a longitudinal study of learner drivers designed to assess hazard identification over the period spent learning to drive under supervision. Participants viewed videos of driving scenarios and were asked to identify hazards and potential hazards. There were ten videos, five from local familiar locations and five from an unfamiliar foreign location. Findings showed no significant difference between the locations, whereas there were significant differences between the number of hazards across the five presented road types (motorway, hinterland, urban, suburban, city). This suggests that with limited driving experience, the schemata adopted by learner drivers in local areas are readily applied to areas that they have not previously driven in.