Honeywell Enhancing Airplane State Awareness (EASA) Project: Final Report on Refinement and Evaluation of Candidate Solutions for Airplane System State Awareness

The loss of pilot airplane state awareness (ASA) has been implicated as a factor in several 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 with a formative pilot-in-the-loop evaluation in NASA Langleys full-motion Research Flight Deck. The technologies address: 1) data source anomaly detection in real-time, 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 operational utility, workload, acceptability, complexity, and usability. The team concludes that there is a feasible retrofit solution for improving ASA that would minimize certification risk, integration costs, and training impact

Evaluation of the Sustainable Employment in a Green US Economy (SEGUE)

The Rockefeller Foundation's Sustainable Employment in a Green US Economy(SEGUE) initiative has been a central player in green job discussions since 2009, andeven earlier through the Foundation's Campaign for American Workers. In its earliestdevelopmental stages, the initiative sought "to maximize the 'green' growth areas ofthe economy while benefiting low- and moderate-income workers" (RockefellerFoundation, 2009b). SEGUE focused on creating jobs by supporting green economicactivities. Initially, the focus was the building energy-retrofit market in the constructionindustry and, later, on water infrastructure and waste management. The demandfor workers became recognized as the bottleneck that needed to be released, in orderto realize the benefits of the green economy.To document and expand upon the learning and exploration that SEGUE has started,the Rockefeller Foundation provided a grant to the research firm, Abt Associates,Inc., in April 2012, to conduct a short-term, developmental evaluation of SEGUE. Theevaluation focused on three areas: learning for the purposes of determining SEGUE'sfuture direction, documenting SEGUE's grant and non-grant outputs for accountabilityneeds, and providing public knowledge on green jobs and evaluations in general.This report provides the results from the evaluation

Assessing V and V Processes for Automation with Respect to Vulnerabilities to Loss of Airplane State Awareness

Automation has contributed substantially to the sustained improvement of aviation safety by minimizing the physical workload of the pilot and increasing operational efficiency. Nevertheless, in complex and highly automated aircraft, automation also has unintended consequences. As systems become more complex and the authority and autonomy (A&A) of the automation increases, human operators become relegated to the role of a system supervisor or administrator, a passive role not conducive to maintaining engagement and airplane state awareness (ASA). The consequence is that flight crews can often come to over rely on the automation, become less engaged in the human-machine interaction, and lose awareness of the automation mode under which the aircraft is operating. Likewise, the complexity of the system and automation modes may lead to poor understanding of the interaction between a mode of automation and a particular system configuration or phase of flight. These and other examples of mode confusion often lead to mismanaging the aircraft"TM"s energy state or the aircraft deviating from the intended flight path. This report examines methods for assessing whether, and how, operational constructs properly assign authority and autonomy in a safe and coordinated manner, with particular emphasis on assuring adequate airplane state awareness by the flight crew and air traffic controllers in off-nominal and/or complex situations