Tactile Spatial Guidance for Collision Avoidance in NextGen Flight Operations

Future aviation operations will require pilots to assume new tasks, such as self-separation. Tactile displays are a promising means of supporting this task. They are well suited for presenting spatial information and offload the heavily taxed visual and auditory channels. This experiment assessed the effectiveness of tactile spatial alerts for notifying pilots of an aircraft intruding on their flight path during Closely Spaced Parallel Approaches. Two alerting strategies (single-stage vs. graded) and two alert types (status vs. command) were compared. 19 pilots had to fly a series of approaches, detect tactile alerts and perform evasive maneuvers. The detection rate for tactile alerts was 100%. Graded and status alerts led to the highest response accuracy (100% and 98%, respectively). Response times were faster for command alerts and during manual flight. These results indicate that tactile displays are effective for conveying spatial information and can help prevent collisions in future aviation operations.