Effects of time of day and taxi route complexity on navigation errors: An experimental study

This study aimed to evaluate the effects of time of day and taxi route complexity on navigation errors. Nine pilots participated in the experiment. Four testing conditions defined by time of day conditions (i.e., nighttime versus daytime) and taxi route complexity (i.e., more complex versus less complex) were examined. Participants were instructed to perform simulated taxiing tasks in each of the testing conditions. Navigation errors during taxiing were counted. In addition, eye movement measures can reflect pilots' attention allocation, situation awareness and mental workload that are closely related to the risk of navigation errors. Thus, eye movement measures including fixation rate, average fixation duration and average pupil area were also selected as dependent variables. We found that navigation errors were fewer at night compared to in daytime. This could be explained by the finding that pilots paid more attention to the environmental clues out of the window at night, inducing better situation awareness for accurate taxiing. More complex taxi route was found to be associated with more navigation errors, but participants' visual behaviors were consistent between route complexity conditions, indicating that pilots' visual operation strategies did not contribute to the increased number of navigation errors in the more complex taxi route condition.