Development of Optimized Keyboards for Rotary-Wing Aircraft

The cockpit of many modern helicopters includes computers and computer keyboards. However, the standard 10- finger keyboard will not fit in a crowded cockpit and cannot be used by pilots who must keep at least one hand on the flight controls. We considered how to design an alternative keyboard layout that minimizes text entry time. We gathered data on the kind of text entry that is performed by pilots flying the AH-64D Apache helicopter. We built a quantitative model of how long it would take to enter this kind of text with the current keyboard used by the pilots. We then used the model to create an alternative optimized keyboard that shuffled the layout of letters in a way that should allow (according to the model) much faster entry of the text. An experiment demonstrated an advantage for the optimized design over the original design.