Tactical vs. Strategic Behavior: General Aviation Piloting in Convective Weather Scenarios

Abstract

We commonly describe environments and behavioral responses to environmental conditions as “tactical” and “strategic.” However theoretical research defining relevant environmental characteristics is rare, as are empirical investigations that would inform such theory. This paper discusses General Aviation (GA) pilots' descriptions of tactical/strategic conditions with respect to weather flying, and evaluates their ratings along a tactical/strategic scale in response to real convective weather scenarios experienced during a flight experiment with different weather information cues. Perceived risk was significantly associated with ratings for all experimental conditions. In addition, environmental characteristics were found to be predictive of ratings for Traditional IMC (instrument meteorological conditions), i.e., aural weather information only, and Traditional VMC (visual meteorological conditions), i.e., aural information and an external view. The paper also presents subjects' comments regarding use of Graphical Weather Information Systems (GWISs) to support tactical and strategic weather flying decisions and concludes with implications for the design and use of GWISs.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Funk

Braune

(1999). The Agenda Manager: A KnowledgeBased System to Facilitate the Management of Flight Deck Activities, SAE 1999-01-5536. 1999 World Aviation Congress, San Francisco, CA.

Hart

S.G.

Staveland

L.E.

(1988). Development of NASA-TLX: Results of empirical and theoretical research. In Hancock

P.A.

Meshkati

(Eds.) Human Mental Workload (139–183). North-Holland: Elsevier Science.

Hayes-Roth

(1979). A cognitive model of planning. Cognitive Science, 3, 275–310.

Honeywell International Inc. (2001) Bendix/King KMD 550/850 Multi-function Display. Flight Information Services (FIS) Pilot's Guide Addendum. Honeywell International Inc., Olathe, KS.

Latorella

Pliske

Hutton

Chrenka

(2001) Cognitive Task Analysis of Business Jet Pilots' Weather Flying Behaviors: Preliminary Results. NASA-TM-2001-211034.

Latorella

Chamberlain

(2002). Graphical weather information system evaluation: Usability, perceived utility, and preferences from General Aviation pilots. SAE General Aviation Technology Conference & Exhibition (Paper 02GAA-3)..

Latorella

Chamberlain

(2001) Decision-making in flight with different convective weather information sources: Preliminary Results. Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium for Aviation Psychology..

McClellan

J.M.

(2002) Strategy v. tactics. Flying, January, p. 11.

Schutte (1997) Unpublished manuscript, also cited as personal communication in Rogers & Feyereisen (1998).

10.

Raby

Wickens

C.D.

(1991). Strategic behavior in flight workload management. Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Aviation Psychology, 1130–1135.

11.

Rogers

(1996). Flight deck task management: A cognitive engineering analysis. Proceedings of the 40th Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 239–243.

12.

Rogers

Feyereisen

(1998). An analysis of strategic and tactical crew behavior. Honeywell Technology Center Technical Report. Honeywell Technology Center, Minneapolis, MN. (NASA Contract: NAS1-20219).

13.

RTCA, Inc. (2001) Minimum Operational Performance Standard for Flight Information Services-Broadcast (FIS-B) Data Link, RTCA/DO-267, RTCA Inc. SC-195, Washington P.C.