Management of multiple tasks: cockpit task management errors

It is argued that a flightcrew has not only to perform tasks, but to manage them as well, and that proper task management can be crucial to the successful completion of the flight mission. From this perspective, a framework for cockpit task management (CTM) has been proposed. Based on this framework, a set of CTM errors is being derived from aircraft accident/incident reports and flight simulator experiments. The results of a preliminary analysis of 14 air accident reports are presented. It is found that not correctly initiating a task contributes to over one third of the errors in these accidents. An initial attempt to derive the cause of such errors indicates that the pilot´s knowledge of the aircraft or the procedures is usually limited in those tasks when abnormal conditions occurred. A preliminary set of specifications for a pilot-vehicle interface is proposed on the basis of the preliminary results