The Effect of Automation on the Frequency of Task Prioritization Errors on Commercial Aircraft Flight Decks: an Asrs Incident Report Study

Task Management (TM) refers to the function in which the human operator manages his/her available sensory and mental resources in a dynamic, complex, safety critical environment in order to accomplish the multiple tasks competing for a limited quantity of attention. There is reason to believe that the level of automation on the commercial aircraft flight deck may affect TM. Two samples of 210 Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) incident reports were compared to determine how automation affects TM. The first sample consisted of reports submitted by pilots flying advanced technology aircraft and the second by pilots flying traditional technology aircraft. TM was explored by looking at Task Prioritization errors. Twenty-eight incident reports from the advanced technology sample and 15 were from the Traditional Technology sample were classified as containing Task Prioritization errors. This difference was found to be statistically significant.