Development and Evaluation of Single Pilot Operations with the Human-Centered Design Approach

Abstract

The high costs of pilot training and remuneration have placed a heavy financial burden on airlines, prompting people to actively study Single Pilot Operations (SPO). Achieving SPO undoubtedly requires the development of the new conceptual framework, and how to reallocate system functions among new agents to obtain optimal system design has become the primary problem in the early stages of the system lifecycle. To solve this problem, this paper applied the Human-centered Design (HCD) approach for the first time to the development and evaluation of SPO in the typical approach and landing scenario. Firstly, the combination of Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) and Abstraction Hierarchy (AH) was used to identify five function requirements and six function assumptions for the transition from the current Two-crew Operations (TCO) to the future SPO to develop the SPO model. Subsequently, the TCO and SPO models were transformed into two network models to evaluate the result of system function reallocation from the network level and node level using Social Network Analysis (SNA). The network parameters of both levels show that the future SPO developed in this paper has the advantages of better stability, less pilot workload and higher safety than the current TCO.