Towards a seamless integration of awareness support and alerting systems: Why and how

In previous research, the requirement for increased awareness of (potential) future hazards has been addressed with an emphasis on the terrain hazard. The ease with which terrain awareness is obtained when using synthetic vision displays results from the fact that the pilot can see the terrain in a frame of reference in which extrapolation to the future situation is trivial, i.e. if the velocity vector points into terrain, the current direction of flight will lead to a loss of separation at some point. With an adequately designed synthetic vision display, the pilot also obtains information about the temporal distance to the hazard, yielding level 3 terrain awareness. In contrast, level 3 awareness of traffic hazards cannot simply be obtained by integrating a depiction of traffic in a synthetic vision display. Unlike the level 3 terrain awareness, which makes it almost impossible that a terrain alert comes as a surprise, an information gap still exists between traffic awareness support and the traffic alerting system. In this paper it is illustrated that trying to close this gap by focusing on traffic depiction is not the solution. To prevent a future loss of separation with traffic, knowing where the traffic currently is, is less important than determining whether, where, and when a loss of separation will occur. The information needed to answer these three questions can be provided through a visualization of the conflict space. The conflict probing concept can be used to achieve this, while at the same time integrating terrain, weather and traffic hazards. Given this potential, the conflict probing concept was selected as the approach to implement the human-machine interface of the Integrated Alerting and Notification function in the Integrated Intelligent Flight Deck research. In this paper, the rationale and the design of the visualization of conflict probes on the primary flight display, navigation display and vertical profile display are discussed.