Evaluation of Technology Concepts for Energy, Automation, and System State Awareness in Commercial Airline Flight Decks

Abstract

A pilot-in-the-loop flight simulation study was conducted at NASA Langley Research Center to evaluate flight deck systems that (1) provide guidance for recovery from low energy states and stalls, (2) present the current state and expected future state of automated systems, and/or (3) show the state of flight-critical data systems in use by automated systems and primary flight instruments. The study was conducted using 13 commercial airline crews from multiple airlines, paired by airline to minimize procedural effects. Scenarios spanned a range of complex conditions and several emulated causal and contributing factors found in recent accidents involving loss of state awareness by pilots (e.g., energy state, automation state, and/or system state). Three new technology concepts were evaluated while used in concert with current state-of-the-art flight deck systems and indicators. The technologies include a stall recovery guidance algorithm and display concept, an enhanced airspeed control indicator that shows when automation is no longer actively controlling airspeed, and enhanced synoptic pages designed to work with simplified interactive electronic checklists. An additional synoptic was developed to provide the flight crew with information about the effects of loss of flight critical data. Data was collected via questionnaires administered at the completion of flight scenarios, audio/video recordings, flight data, head and eye tracking data, pilot control inputs, and researcher observations. This paper presents findings derived from the questionnaire responses and subjective data measures including workload, situation awareness, usability, and acceptability as well as analyses of two low-energy flight events that resulted in near-stall conditions