Human-in-the-loop Evaluation of an Information Management and Notification System to Improve Aircraft State Awareness

Abstract

Flight crew’s decision making has historically been one of the leading contributing and causal factors in aircraft accidents. In many accidents happened over the past decades, the flight crew was unaware of the aircraft state during hazard exposure and, hence, corrective actions were not taken in time. As the automation level continues to increase inside modern aircraft cockpit for the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), flight crew may be even further removed from traditional flight duties and be required to focus more on system management and monitoring (i.e., pilot-on-the-loop) than system operating (i.e., pilot-in-the-loop). Without effective information management methods and architectures as well as alerting systems, the level of flight crew unawareness of the aircraft state may become an even more serious safety risk. A Flight Deck Information Management (FDIM) framework as well as a Multiple Hypothesis Prediction (MHP) method were previously proposed to address ineffective alerting and invalid source data issues and provide flight crew with improved aircraft state awareness. A Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) simulation study is conducted to evaluate the initial Information Management (IM) methods and notification strategies online and to collect data for both nominal and off-nominal flight runs. The HITL study uses a confederate pilot and a confederate air traffic controller to induce the off-nominal conditions and the MHP method is used to provide improved aircraft state awareness to the participants. Preliminary results of the HITL study are presented in this paper.