Hearing has a much greater impact on performance than most people realize.
Modern aircraft designs put high demands on vision as the primary sense for information gathering, but such designs can lead to increased attentional demands that have the potential to decrease situational awareness.
To compensate, sound has become more important for delivering information or to divert a pilot’s attention to an area that needs monitoring.
At a very basic level, the ability to hear a signal will affect a pilot’s ability to respond to that signal. A signal could be missed because of physical problems related to the ear or because of environmental issues such as noise.
In addition to signal interference, noise associated with flight can cause physiological and/or psychological problems that can degrade performance.
The effects of noise on performance are complex. However, from an operational point of view, one of the most important issues is how noise affects attention. A number of studies have explored this issue.
Findings demonstrated that noise tends to decrease the ability to share attention between several concurrent tasks, especially when the tasks must be performed for extended periods of time.