On the transition and migration of flight functions in the airspace system

Abstract

Since ~400 BC, when man first replicated flying behavior with kites, up until the turn of the 20th century, when the Wright brothers performed the first successful powered human flight, flight functions have become available to man via significant support from man-made structures and devices. Over the past 100 years or so, technology has enabled several flight functions to migrate to automation and/or decision support systems. This migration continues with the United States' NextGen and Europe's Single European Sky (a.k.a. SESAR) initiatives. These overhauls of the airspace system will be accomplished by accommodating the functional capabilities, benefits, and limitations of technology and automation together with the unique and sometimes overlapping functional capabilities, benefits, and limitations of humans. This paper will discuss how a safe and effective migration of any flight function must consider several interrelated issues, including, for example, shared situation awareness, and automation addiction, or overreliance on automation. A long-term philosophical perspective is presented that considers all of these issues by primarily asking the following questions: How does one find an acceptable level of risk tolerance when allocating functions to automation versus humans? How does one measure or predict with confidence what the risks will be? These two questions and others will be considered from the two most-discussed paradigms involving the use of increasingly complex systems in the future: "humans as operators" and "humans as monitors."

Developing human-autonomy teaming characteristics and guidance in aerospace operations

“…Alternatively, in some off-nominal or contingency situations the autonomous teammate may not always be capable of performing all of its tasks. Pilot should be alerted to take over the tasks if necessary Morris & Young, 2012).…”

“…Increased transparency helps build trust and confirms progress for the pilot , but must be balanced against increased pilot workload to review the information . Monitoring of automation enables pilot detection of autonomous teammate's errors or faults in reasoning (Morris & Young, 2012), which may result in the pilot taking over tasks. Pilot actions can be assessed to decide how the autonomous teammate should present required information and controls .…”