Emergency flight planning with the EFP interface: an empirical evaluation

During emergency situations, pilots must generate an emergency flight plan that is feasible, effective and safe to guide the plane to touchdown. An initial experiment with the Emergency Flight Planner (EFP) revealed problems with pilots´ use of the planner´s interface. This study is aimed at discovering whether pilot difficulties are the direct result of a poor interface, or the result of the complex nature of emergency flight planning. A mixture of results was discovered. Pilots found the EFP to provide increased visualization capabilities, along with increased computational power in comparison with manual calculations. Though pilots found the EFP interface tools useful in their opinion, their methodology of flight planning often conflicted with that of the EFP