The purpose of this thesis is to study the optimal arrangement of aircraft instrument panels through the human factors approach.
Human factors engineering is the process of effectively fitting the human component to the machine component in any man-machine system. The human factors are especially important to an aircraft pilot who must constantly shift his attention between the instrument panel within the cockpit and the surrounding area of the aircraft.
The preliminary part of this study is to find the general patterns of the Korean pilot's eye movements during their various flying maneuvers, and which instruments require the most attention while in flight. It is assumed that all pilots have a general pattern of eye movement when observing the aircraft instrument panel and that an optimum arrangement would be to minimize the eye travel distance between instruments.
In this thesis the arrangements of instruments is taken to be the independent variable and the eye travel distance between instruments the dependent variable. In order to compile the information necessary for this study, sixty Korean Air Force pilots were interviewed and requested to complete information forms. These information forms listed various flying maneuvers and listed each instrument used on the instrument panel. The compilation of the information on these completed forms listed the instruments most frequently used by the pilots.
The second part of this study was to determine the optimum instrument arrangement. It was necessary to study the various number of possible arrangements of instruments depending upon the number of instruments involved.
Therefore, these instruments are grouped by two major functions, The flight instruments were subdivided into three groups, and the engineering instruments were subdivided into six groups. With this subdivision we arrive at the possible number of arrangements of 4,320.
Through the simulation method, total eye travel distance for each of these 4,320 arrangements is calculated and the arrangement which appears to be of optimum distance between the most frequently used aircraft instruments is determined. The results of this study indicate that the optimum distance between instruments would be 33,028cm and that the corresponding distance of the instrument panel now being used is 34,283cm. Therefore, an increased efficiency of 3.8\% would be realized if the existing aircraft instrument panel were re-arranged according to layout proposed in this thesis.
