Pilot Situation Awareness and Alerting System Commands

Two common stated objectives of modern cockpit systems are improving pilot situation awareness and adding the safety benefits of sophisticated alerting and command generation functions. However, expected gains in safety are not realized if these two functions appear to provide conflicting or dissonant information to the pilot. This paper details three experiments examining this issue. Then, a general discussion is provided on pilot situation awareness in alerting situations, and on pilot nonconformance to alerting systems. Finally, design recommendations for alerting systems and situation displays are made.