The Evaluation of Two CDU Concepts and Their Effects on FMS Training

One of the biggest challenges for a pilot in the transition to a "glass" cockpit is understanding the Flight Management System (FMS). This is due to both the complex nature of the FMS and to the pilot-FMS interface. For these reasons, a large portion of transition training is devoted to the FMS. The intent of the current study was to examine the impact of the primary pilot-FMS interface, the Control Display Unit (CDU), on FMS training. The hypothesis of this study was that the interface design could have a significant impact on training. An FMS simulation was developed with two separate interfaces. One interface was similar to a current-generation design and the other was a multi-windows CDU based on graphical user interface techniques. For both application and evaluation reasons, constraints were applied to the graphical CDU design to maintain as much similarity as possible with the conventional CDU.