Pilot Procedure-Following Behavior During Closely Spaced Parallel Approaches

A flight simulator experiment was run to examine pilot procedure-following behavior during closely spaced parallel approaches. Such approaches are being considered under the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) to increase the capacity of runway systems, possibly without the need to increase the footprint of airports. Pilots flying these approaches utilized a simple heuristic to fly the procedure consistently, despite the heuristic being suboptimal for any of the three conditions. Moreover, procedure compliance was relatively low, but noncompliance itself was not unsafe unless accompanied by situation awareness problems. In some cases, noncompliance could be shown to be a better choice than compliance. These results have implications for assumptions regarding procedure-following by pilots utilizing novel procedures in NextGen.