“Soft” Controls for Hard Displays: Still a Challenge

Abstract

Future trends in design of controls and displays for cockpit sub-systems (electrical, pneumatics, fuel, etc.), will undoubtedly focus on replacing dedicated “hard” controls with reconfigurable “soft” controls depicted on the sub-system schematic display. This concept would allow for direct manipulation of mechanical components via the display. The case study reported here discusses the approach, redesign, and evaluation of soft controls and multi-functional displays for the Advanced Concepts Flight Simulator (ACFS), a two-engine, “generic” airliner. The redesign effort focused on the input interface (a touch sensitive screen), the display concept, and improving “navigation” among sub-system displays. The paper concludes with a summary of questionnaire data and comments of 26 airline pilots who flew a four-segment mission in the simulator. The subjective results indicated that pilots favored the direct manipulation concepts and the ability to link alerts, procedures, and configuration tasks. However, the technology used to support this concept still requires improvements.