United States Department of Transportation
i
Tailoring Surface Winds Information for Mobile Meteorological Applications, Part 1: Beta-Testing
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2018-07-01
[PDF-2.52 MB]
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Edition:Final
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Abstract:The purpose of this study was to learn how to help pilots land aircraft more safely and efficiently under windy conditions. While other factors such as visibility and runway conditions are obviously part of real landings, this research, expressly controlled for and tried to remove other factors from concern to let pilots focus on winds alone. The key to safe landing under windy conditions lies in accurate and timely assessment of runway wind components (headwind/tailwind and crosswind). We can visualize pilot perception of low-level runway winds as a speed-accuracy process. Pilots are trained to assess reports such as METARs and extract wind components. As long as the necessary data are present, they seem to try to estimate those wind components to the best of their ability, even when the geometry of a given situation is complex. This study shows that they are reasonably adept at the task. However, wind depictions vary in efficiency, some requiring more cognitive processing time than others. So, in judging the usefulness of these various wind information depictions, we cannot expect to see great differences in accuracy. Instead, given equivalent levels of accuracy, the faster depiction can be considered the more efficient. To those ends, we tested 25 general aviation pilots on 18 runway wind scenarios, varying in crosswind and headwind/tailwind components, and runway orientation. In each scenario, pilots manipulated a tablet computer (iPad) to see a wind information page with one of four different formats for depicting the airport wind information. Two depictions were text-based, the other two, graphical. The results of this study are clear and simple. The runway-relative, two-wind component depiction was significantly the fastest, most efficient of the four depictions tested. Moreover, this was the depiction pilots unanimously said they preferred, saying it removed the difficult task of having to mentally calculate the wind components.
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