Research On Errors In Radiotelephony Communication For Pilots Based On Cognitive Ability

In recent years,there are so many civil aviation flight accidents and the accident symptoms caused by the radiotelephony communication errors,but there is little scientific study of the causes of errors in radiotelephony communication.The radiotelephony communication is a specific communication between people,so finding the human factors in the cause of the radiotelephony communication errors is the key to improving the quality of the communication between pilots and air traffic controllers.The controller’s communication has been disciplined by many mature legal norms,while pilots are relatively free.Therefore,it is necessary to explore the reasons for the pilot’s readback errors in radiotelephony communication.Based on the information processing theory,the process of the pilot’s information processing is divided into three stages: information input,information processing and information output.On the basis of previous studies on the cognitive ability of pilots,the cognitive ability required by pilots in radiotelephony communication is analyzed at each stage of information processing.It is found that attention,short-term memory,thinking ability and language ability may affect the pilot in The radiotelephony communication.Furthermore,20 flying cadets who have passed level 3 test of the English proficiency test for flight crew are selected as the subjects.The four cognitive abilities above have been designed as 2×2×2×2intra-group design experiments,and the independent variables are interference(interference,no interference),instruction length(2 instructions,3 instructions),error instructions(error instructions,no error instructions)and language(Chinese,English),and four sub-experiments by Latin square design to balance the influence of the order of the variables in the experiment on the experimental results have been designed.The times of the subjects asked the controller to repeat the instructions and the number of errors occurred during the readback has been chosen as the performance indicators of the radiotelephony communication.The results show that attention and short-term memory have a significant impact on the performance of radiotelephony communication;thinking ability will impact the pilots’ recognition of instructions significantly while has no significant impact on the performance ofradiotelephony communication;language ability will significantly affect the number of repetitions in the radiotelephony communication,while has no significant impact on the number of errors.The interaction between independent variables has no significant effect on the performance of radiotelephony communication.Combined with the analysis results,the correlativity between every cognitive ability and the performance of the radiotelephony communication has been discussed,then to comprehensively measure the attention,short-term memory,thinking ability and language ability of pilots in the radiotelephony communication,the comprehensive cognitive ability index R has been constructed.And R may reflect the pilot’s communication performance to some extent.The thesis confirms four cognitive ability factors in affecting the radiotelephony communication,and proposes corresponding suggestions for improving the quality of radiotelephony communication based on different cognitive abilities,which provides a theoretical basis for pilot’s selection and training.