I'm an engineering student from Belgium and I study at the faculty of
aerospace engineering of the Technical University of Delft, The
Netherlands. I'm currently doing a human factors study about the
difficulties of an approach and landing. So i thought maybe this is a
good place to reach many pilots of different experience at once. I'd
be very gratefull for the feedback you could provide me on the next
questions. They're quite general but will give me a good starting
point for a more detailed study.

Note: where applicable please differentiate between IFR and VFR
approaches.

1) Which fase (initial descent, ILS approach, approach stability,
flare, touchdown, taxi) of an approach and landing do you find most
difficult and why?

2) Which specific tasks during approach and landing do you find most
difficult to combine?

3) Which of the four primary tasks, defined below, do you find hardest
to combine during an approach and landing?

4) Which of the four primary tasks are most demanding for the pilot
flying and the pilot non flying? If possible, you could also mention
some very demanding specific subtasks.

5) Which external factors (e.g. bad wheather, disagreements with other
crewmembers) do you find the most influencing on the general pilot
workload?

6) Which parameters (length runway, slope runway, crosswind, weather,
available aids,...) do you find most important for the difficulty of a
landing?

7) If you could make a suggestion to the authorities like the FAA to
alleviate the workload during approach and landing, what would this
be?

8) If you believe important aspects are not adressed in the
questionnaire, please mention them here. Any other comments are also
welcome here.

Extra information; if you could provide me with general information
about yourself, this would be much appreciated:
- general aviation or commercial
- estimate of flight hours

Many thanks in advance!!!!!!!






NOTE: DEFINITION OF TASKS

flight management task: collection of all discrete tasks, so tasks tha
have a limited time span, e.g. doing the landing checklist

manual control task: the continuous task of manually flying the
airplane. If the autopilot is used, this can be replaced by an
intensive continuous monitoring task.

scanning and monitoring: continuous task of perception of information
on the state of the aircraft. So scaaning is the acquisition of data
and understanding it, while monitoring stands for the
guarding-function of the pilot with respect to the aircraft-state.

ATC task: includes the obvious comm tasks and the less obvious tasks
imposed by the consequences of ATC-dictated altitudes and speeds. Both
discrete tasks and continuous tasks.