Category: Uncategorized

Task Management on the FlightDeck

~ cjois

One of the highlights of this week’s readings was the aspect of coherence (Salas & Maurino, 2010). For coherence to be effective, pilots need to have a deep understanding of the underlying logic, systems and automation impacts. The cognitive load has grown significantly over the years and continues to grow even faster today. While it is possible to acquire and display a lot more data in the form of meaningful information on extra-rich customizable displays, an important consideration would be to understand at what point this reaches practical human limits.

In the end, there is no limit on information that can be provided or assimilated by the crew. What matters is how much can be meaningfully assimilated in limited amounts of time (many times minutes or seconds) and most importantly, acted upon to achieve an outcome.

Information overload occurs frequently and very rapidly. My observation is that a few different visual and aural call-outs occurring simultaneously (example: a GPWS callout and a TCAS alert) are enough to cause overload in an otherwise quiet flightdeck. If they occur to be in conflict its worse.

With rising stress levels, saturation occurs faster (Salas & Maurino, 2010).  The ability to filter, and hone in, on important elements of information being presented is the answer to avoiding overwhelm. I believe that this ability is a function of two things – a) experience and b) personality.

CJ

References

Salas, E. & Maurino, D. (2010). Human Factors in Aviation (2nd Ed.). New York: Academic Press.

FSX with Active Sky NEXT – Better Clouds and Rain

~ cjois

Testing the HiFi’s technologies new software product. It was a nww experience using ASN. It models low visibilities and clouds much better. low visibility and low ceilings was very nice.

Mountain obscuration with ASN was even a better experience. very nice light grey clouds and blue skies.

I had tried to upload some pictures. But some of the readers say that the site hardly ever loads up. I am not that technically savvy and I am not able to fix the page load problem. I tried uploading low resolution small pictures from my TV monitor, but even those are causing issues. Maybe I need to figure out a better way to build these pages.

Site Update

~ cjois

An update on the site itself… some file – either a post or one of the pages on the site has got corrupted. That is the reason the site does not load consistently and the pages dont come up like before.

Please bear with me as I figure out which post, image or page is causing the issue. Initially i thought it was large images that were causing the problem. But even after removing it, the problem persists. So i have tried taking out all the posts and pages and adding them back in one by one. But that is a long task… between work and family – not enough time to do this…. slowly getting there.

Thanks for your patience….

Update – I have added back most of the old posts and pages one at a time. There shouldn’t be any issues with the site now.

SimRes

Update

~ cjois

I was trying to upload some pictures of the new ORBX scenery that I installed. However, that didn’t work. The page load times were so bad that it would never fully load the page.

I ended up recovering the site from a backup. In that process some of the posts and pages may not be in the same sequence as before. What I cant make out is what I may have lost in the process because the backup was also from some time ago.

The good thing is that the web site loads faster now. Over time I will fix the sequence of the posts and pages.

Thanks for your patience.

SimRes

Active Sky NEXT – Visual Artifacts and Potential Solution

~ cjois

Just a quick update on Active Sky NEXT.
Tried applying a few tweaks and adjusting the sliders. No impact.
The artifacts continue. More importantly, tried again with Active Sky 2012 only.  The problem persists even with AS2012. Never had that before with AS2012 for over the year I have been running it. Have written to HiFITech asking if ASN writes new textures or shaders in my FSX PC that may be causing this issue.

Will update when I find the answer.

UPDATE – Jan 4 2014
The answer lies in adjusting the CDD setting in ASN. Under options, there is the ability to control the MIN and MAX CDD value. In the past this was controlled purely in FSX in the CDD setting. What ASN does is adapt this value in FSX as needed. When given a range, this is determined by a variety of factors and ASN intelligently decides the most appropriate value for the situation. However you could choose to lock it at 60 mi. This is done by setting both MIN and MAX to 60. In this case, it is basically simulating what we had before – which was lock it to a value in FSX.

In my case, this seems to resolve the situation greatly. Artifacts, screen tears on my display and glitches have considerably reduced.