PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Electronic flight progress strips....what system is the best
Old 22nd Aug 2010, 23:13
  #43 (permalink)  
Tarq57
 
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Wellington,NZ
Age: 66
Posts: 1,675
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The light levels varied, why is that of interest? This has not been an issue as far as I am aware.
Towers generally have 360 degree windows. For the first and last 3 hours or so of daylight, if you live in a place where there are sunny days, a combination of reflection and insufficient contrast on the screens makes them difficult to read, unless up close, personal, and pretty much square-on to the display. At night time, the overhead lights are a factor for reflection, unless re-positioning/redesign of them is taken into account when the EFS is installed.

Wellington is mainly medium and light traffic, and the occasional heavy. There is a reasonable amount of VFR traffic. The typical routes through the control zone, of both IFR and VFR traffic, can be somewhat complex.

But it's not the traffic mix that's the problem. We've deal with that happily for years. It's the heads-down time, and the type of mental distraction that creates.

If I want to write something on a conventional strip, say, a VFR clearance, or a ground taxi route, I move my hand over the approximate entry area on the strip, check that the pen is armed, and write. I can do this with a single glance; once the pen is in the correct place, and write what I want, while at the same time watching the runway. Or the weather. Or glancing at final approach. Or whatever. Even talking on the radio. I can actually multi-task rather well. And I don't have to compensate for parallax error. Where the nib touches the surface is where the data magically appears when the tool is activated.

If I want to enter the same info in an electronic strip, I have to take the scribe and touch the strip within a millimetre or two of the entry point. Sometimes that opens the wrong menu, because silly old me has moved laterally since I last calibrated the screen, maybe to look around a window frame, or stand up, or to peer up at a departing flight, or whatever. (Tower controllers do move around, a bit.) So then I have to close that menu, move my head to pretty much exactly where it was when the screen was last calibrated, touch the screen in the correct location, select from the available options on a drop-down menu, or go into a sub-menu, tap it, exit out (maybe twice), tap it again when the pilot reads it back.

Or I can use the crap writing tool. Works well on delivery or SMC, where there is a bit of time to faff around doing that.

So far, the heads down time has not made a huge difference, because with the reduction in air traffic over the past couple of years, we aren't dealing with as many flights as we used to. But guess what? It feels like we're dealing with more.

When you work in a busy tower, which is a pretty tactical sort of operation, an extra couple of seconds actually does make a disproportionate difference to the workload, not only because of the increased heads-down time, but because of the nature of the distraction, requiring a different kind of thought process to deal with. And every time you issue an instruction to an aircraft, some kind of strip interaction is usually required.

Pen and paper= simplicity and reliability. Never had a paper strip fail. Never had to reboot a Bic pen, and wait for half a minute for it to work again, because the ink dried up. A replacement was always within reach. I can talk, watch, plan, listen peripherally and write all at the same time. (Or tiny bursts of separated time, that appear to occupy the same temporal space to the consciousness. Multi-tasking is more correctly called time-splitting, these days.)

That's without going into the involved types of different data sources humans use. There is more than just visual. Any controller will tell you that tactile was an important "mental reinforcement-type" action.

Maybe I'm just thick, but I can't do that successfully using an EFS system; or at least, our EFS system.

Anyway, that's my last semi-educated rant on the subject.
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