Pilot situation awareness (SA) regulates flight safety, and inexperience may impair novice pilot reliability in SA. This study aims to determine the key influencing factors of novice pilot SA and to analyze the interrelationship and interaction mechanism of the factors. We investigated 55 novice pilots trained at aviation schools and identified the influencing factor index system by the Delphi survey. The method of Decision Making Trial and Evaluation (DEMATEL) combined with Adversarial Interpretive Structure Modeling (AISM) was adopted. The results show that: (1) The influencing factor index system includes 18 factors, divided into four categories: individual factors, team factors, task and human-machine system factors, and cockpit environment factors. (2) Team communication, team cooperation, basic cognitive ability, interface design, occupational age and experience, and authority gradient are the six crucial influencing factors. The former three have the greatest association with other factors, while the latter three are most likely to affect other factors. (3) Team communication, basic cognitive ability, and interface design are root-cause factors, of which team communication is the most fundamental. (4) The results of DEMATEL and AISM are consistent, both disclosing team communication as the fundamental factor with the highest priority, and cockpit environmental factors as the direct influencing factors but most susceptible to other factors. The present study can be viewed as a conducive attempt to extract vital influencing factors of novice pilot SA, and to provide ergonomic insights for determining the priorities to improve novice pilot SA in training and aircraft design for flight safety.

According to a previously built situation-awareness (SA) model based on attention allocation, with the ACT-R (Adaptive Control of Thought, Rational) theory for analyzing pilot cognitive processes for situation elements, an SA mathematical model was improved to predict pilot SA during exposure to different display interfaces and missions. An indicator-display monitoring task was performed under different experimental conditions for SA model verification, while the SA global assessment technique (SAGAT), performance measures, 10-dimensional SA rating technique (10-D SART), and eye movement measures were adopted to comprehensively assess the operator's SA. The experimental results revealed that theoretical prediction values calculated using the improved SA model were strongly correlated with the operation performance, and thus confirming the model validation. The SAGAT was shown to be a more effective method than SART in this research, and the overall SAGAT accuracy rate, as well as the accuracy response time, are effective indices for SA measurement. Eye-movement indices, such as the fixation/saccade ratio, which corresponds to the mode of information perception and extraction, was examined to be sensitive to operator's SA changes. The Advances of the improved SA model have been achieved in predicting and indicating SA by using human behaviors, including operation performance, SAGAT response behaviors, and visual behaviors. Thereby, it provides a new auxiliary tool for quantitative characterization of pilot's SA during cockpit interface design optimization and ergonomic evaluation.

In order to discriminate situation awareness (SA) levels on the basis of SA-sensitive electroencephalography (EEG) features, the high-SA (HSA) group and low-SA (LSA) groups, which are representative of two SA levels, were classified according to the situation awareness global assessment technology (SAGAT) scores measured in the multi-attribute task battery (MATB) II tasks. Furthermore, three types of EEG features, namely, absolute power, relative power, and slow-wave/fast-wave (SW/FW), were explored using spectral analysis. In addition, repeated analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted in three brain regions (frontal, central, and parietal) × three brain lateralities (left, middle, and right) × two SA groups (LSA and HSA) to explore SA-sensitive EEG features. The statistical results indicate a significant difference between the two SA groups according to SAGAT scores; moreover, no significant difference was found for the absolute power of four waves (delta (δ), theta (θ), alpha (α), and beta (β)). In addition, the LSA group had a significantly lower β relative power than the HSA group in central and partial regions. Lastly, compared with the HSA group, the LSA group had higher θ/β and (θ + α)/(α + β) in all analyzed brain regions, higher α/β in the parietal region, and higher (θ + α)/β in all analyzed regions except for the left and right laterality in the frontal region. The above SA-sensitive EEG features were fed into principal component analysis (PCA) and the Bayes method to discriminate different SA groups, and the accuracies were 83.3% for the original validation and 70.8% for the cross-validation. The results provide a basis for real-time assessment and discrimination of SA by investigating EEG features, thus contributing to monitoring SA decrement that might lead to threats to flight safety.

Air route alternation caused by unexpected events in abnormal or emergency situations often produces adverse consequences on an operator’s cognition and behavior in flight tasks. Under such a circumstance, it is especially necessary to examine the utility of the interaction displays usually designed based on the routine environment. This study was aimed to investigate the effects of air route alternation and display design on operators’ situation awareness (SA), task performance and mental workload during simulated flight tasks. Twenty-four participants attended an experiment where they were instructed to perform simulated flight tasks with three types of display designs in both air-route-as-planned and air-route-altered conditions. Subjective measures, behavioral measures and eye movement measures were adopted to assess the participants’ SA, task performance and mental workload. The results show that unexpected air route alternation increases mental workload as well as deteriorates the SA and task performance due to the gap between attention resource demand and supply. Reducing the demand of the operator’s attention resource should be the focus when coping with unexpected events in abnormal situations. In addition, reasonable information layout, such as a center-layout design of the critical decision-making information, is more important than information salience for improving the SA and task performance in abnormal situations. Nevertheless, indicators with a high-salience design, such as a more open window design and immersive design, are still worth recommending.