The Impact of Changing the Size of Aircraft Radar Displays on Visual Search in the Cockpit

Modern aircraft are designed with larger displays while our legacy aircraft are being retrofit with larger cockpit displays to enable display of the increased data. While this modification has been shown to enable improvements in human performance of many cockpit tasks, this effect is often not measured nor fully understood at a more generalizable level. This research outlines an approach to comparing human performance across two display sizes in future F-16 cockpits. The results show that increases in display size can increase search times under some circumstances even when the displays include a large number of tracks, actually reducing human performance.