Pilots distracted by laptops? Not in cockpits of the future.
Automated flight controls under research may be able to sense how alert pilots are. It’s one way science could help prevent mistakes like the one made by the Northwest pilots who overflew Minneapolis by 150 miles.
By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer/ October 29, 2009 edition
As two Northwest pilots ponder their futures – minus their pilot licenses – researchers are developing new approaches for keeping pilots on their toes on long flights.
It’s part of a larger effort to improve air safety over the next decade or two with the US Federal Aviation Administration’s “NextGen” air-traffic control system.
NextGen draws on a range of high-tech approaches to give pilots more accurate information, about terrain and weather conditions, for instance. More aircraft flight-control systems will be automated. And air traffic controllers will receive more frequent and precise data, allowing them to pack more airliners along routes.
“There are lots of pieces to the puzzle, but I think there’s a general recognition that it’s time to move to the next-generation system,” says R. John Hansman Jr., a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
A vital element of this research involves devising ways to keep pilots engaged when the trip is long and on autopilot.
The buzz phrase is “situational awareness,” something the National Transportation Safety Board said the two pilots of Northwest Airlines Airbus 320 lost when they overshot the Minneapolis airport on Oct. 21 and traveled another 150 miles before they realized what had happened.
For the passengers, if not the pilots, the incident had a happy ending. But that’s not always the case. One study of accidents involving major airlines found that 88 percent of incidents involving pilot error hinged on a lack of situational awareness rather than flying skills, according to Mica Endsley, who heads SA technologies in Marietta, Ga. The company focuses on research on situational awareness.
The concept appears simple – pay attention. The Northwest pilots said they were deep in crew scheduling discussions, “flying” their laptop computers instead of the airplane. In an emergency, specialists say, pilots who haven’t been paying attention have to play catch-up, burning up valuable response time.
But problems also can arise when pilots are presented with too much information.
North Carolina State University engineering professor David Kaber recently explored the effect of two budding technologies – infrared nose cameras and computer-generated 3-D maps – on pilots having to land under instrument-only conditions, typically when visibility is poor. Each approach had its advantage and disadvantage, but taken together, the two systems undercut the pilots’ performance. The problem: too much visual clutter on the display the two systems shared.
As the level of automation increases, pilots can also become more complacent, Dr. Kaber says.
To help offset this effect, some researchers are exploring ways to have automated flight controls “sense” how alert the flight crew is, and adjust the level of automation. The idea, Kaber says, is to increase levels of automation when a pilot is alert and decrease automation when it appears that a pilot is losing long-term focus.
Alertness cues can come from physical traits such as heart rate or the electrical conductivity of skin, which can change with perspiration levels.
Beyond helping pilots stay on their toes, this approach can keep a pilot’s workload at a level that keeps him or her engaged – without the stress that can come from trying to assimilate and respond to too much information.
—-
Click here to read more about the larger questions around the Northwest incident.
—
Follow us on Twitter.
( More stories )
Comments
2. Kemp | 10.30.09
This event speaks to one of many fundamental Airbus design flaws: designing the pilot out of the cockpit in order to reduce “pilot error”. The Airbus philosophy ignores one immutable fact; that no matter how sophisticated the aircraft computers and software are, they don’t even begin to approach the sensory and processing capabilities of the human brain. When you disconnect the pilot to this extent, incidents like this are inevitable
It is ironic that the Airbus design philosophy is centered around designing the pilot out of the cockpit in order to reduce pilot error, yet in this case the pilots were so disconnected that they forgot they were flying.
It is also important also to note that pilots have little or no direct control over an Airbus. ALL of the pilot inputs are routed through one of many computers, and only acted upon if the computer “approves”. Yet despite their sophistication and technical wizardry, no computer can even begin to match the sensory and processing capabilities of a human brain. The Airbus computers had no idea what to do about this situation beyond possibly sounding a ubiquitous and easily ignored chime.
Designing airplanes capable of flying nearly autonomously, while ignoring the fact that no computer is equal to the human brain, is a recipe for disaster. The plane must be designed to keep the pilots engaged, and the pilots must have the option of overriding the computers control of the aircraft if necessary.
4. Jenny | 11.02.09
Decrease automation when they aren’t alert? How does that work? Doesn’t it seem like it should go the other way? They planning on waking the pilots up by flying towards the ground?
5. Russ | 11.06.09
The answer is not so much new technology or regulation, pilots are the most safety oriented people on the planet, aircraft automation is a tool to assist pilots, but designers are making that automation more autonomous rather than making systems that integrate with the human pilots. Younger pilots are becoming experts at dealing with the avionics, but less understanding of basic piloting skills, and therefore, are more likely to exhibit poor judgment. Still, I admit that pilots are human, and they will occasionally make mistakes, that’s why there are two pilots in most commercial aircraft, and looking at the overall accident rate, I would say that the system is working.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
1. Twitter Trackbacks for Pilots distracted by laptops? Not in cockpits of the future. | csmonitor.com [csmonitor.com] on Topsy.com | 10.29.09
Leave a Comment
We do not publish all comments, and we do not publish comments immediately. The comments feature is a forum to discuss the ideas in our stories. Constructive debate - even pointed disagreement - is welcome, but personal attacks on other commenters are not, and will not be published.
Tip: Do not write a novel. Keep it short. We will not publish lengthy comments. Come up with your own statements. This is not a place to cut and paste an email you received. If we recognize it as such, we won't post it.
Please do not post any comments that are commercial in nature or that violate copyrights.
Finally, we will not publish any comments that we regard as obscene, defamatory, or intended to incite violence.
1. Rodney | 10.29.09
This was not a “long” flight. I travel to Asia 4 times a year. 14 plus hours at a minimum. These guys are fools. Glad they will not fly a plane again. Even with a lap top on their lap they have to here the warning buzzers that are part of the controler system. They are full of B.S.