The impact of cockpit automation on crew coordination and communication. Volume 1: Overview, LOFT evaluations, error severity, and questionnaire data

The purpose was to examine, jointly, cockpit automation and social processes. Automation was varied by the choice of two radically different versions of the DC-9 series aircraft, the traditional DC-9-30, and the glass cockpit derivative, the MD-88. Airline pilot volunteers flew a mission in the simulator for these aircraft. Results show that the performance differences between the crews of the two aircraft were generally small, but where there were differences, they favored the DC-9. There were no criteria on which the MD-88 crews performed better than the DC-9 crews. Furthermore, DC-9 crews rated their own workload as lower than did the MD-88 pilots. There were no significant differences between the two aircraft types with respect to the severity of errors committed during the Line-Oriented Flight Training (LOFT) flight. The attitude questionnaires provided some interesting insights, but failed to distinguish between DC-9 and MD-88 crews

Toward Dynamic Monitoring and Suppressing Uncertainty in Wildfire by Multiple Unmanned Air Vehicle System

Containing a wildfire requires an efficient response and persistent monitoring. A crucial aspect is the ability to search for the boundaries of the wildfire by exploring a wide area. However, even as wildfires are increasing today, the number of available monitoring systems that can provide support is decreasing, creating an operational gap and slow response in such urgent situations. The objective of this work is to estimate a propagating boundary and create an autonomous system that works in real time. It proposes a coordination strategy with a new methodology for estimating the periphery of a propagating phenomenon using limited observations. The complete system design, tested on the high-fidelity simulation, demonstrates that steering the vehicles toward the highest perpendicular uncertainty generates the effective predictions. The results indicate that the new coordination scheme has a large beneficial impact on uncertainty suppression. This study thus suggests that an efficient solution for suppressing uncertainty in monitoring a wildfire is to use a fleet of low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles that can be deployed quickly. Further research is needed on other deployment schemes that work in different natural disaster case studies