Intelligent Modules and Advanced Displays to Support Pilot Airplane System State Awareness

Abstract

The loss of pilot airplane state awareness (ASA) has been implicated as a factor in a number of aviation accidents identified by the Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST). These accidents were investigated to identify precursors to the loss of ASA and develop technologies to address the loss of ASA. Based on a gap analysis, two technologies were prototyped and assessed in a formative pilot-in-the-loop evaluation. The technologies address: 1) data source anomaly detection in realtime, and 2) intelligent monitoring aids to provide nominal and predictive awareness of situations to be monitored and a mission timeline to visualize events of interest. The evaluation results indicated favorable impressions of both technologies for mitigating the loss of ASA in terms of workload, acceptability, complexity, and usability.