The Operational Issue of an Airliner’s Reduced-Crew Caused by Data-link Break-up to Remote Support

Abstract

Different operational concepts for Single-Pilot and Reduced-Crew Operations (RCO) in commercial aviation include a ground based supportive component of a remote-copilot. The impact of an outage and break-up of the data-link connecting air and ground has not been investigated yet. Social Network Analysis (SNA) in combination with a Cognitive Work Analysis was used to compare the three crewing options of multi-crew, reduced-crew and a break-up of data-link in RCO in terms of social factors and interactions. A data-link loss decreased the networks density and its resilience to any off-nominal and emergency situations. The single-pilot suffers from higher functional loadings, is located more central and processes a higher information flow. A twofold degraded operational procedure was proposed to mitigate an outage and loss of data-link in combination with additional automation tools onboard. Nonetheless, further research is required to provide a data-link with a big bandwidth as reliable and secure as possible.

A future airliner’s reduced-crew: modelling pilot incapacitation and homicide-suicide with systems theory

“…The autoland system on-board could be applied in the case of inflight incapacitation as well. If the data-link is sufficient reliable (Schmid and Korn 2018), the remote-copilot could also conduct the autoland from the ground in combination with automation tools reviewed above (Table 1). This represents an additional option depending on the data-link's bandwidth, reliability and security.…”

“…These agents are sufficient to model any in-flight incapacitation. Their composition is similar to that proposed in other design concepts of RCO (Lachter et al 2017;Schmid and Korn 2017;Stanton et al 2016). Other possible agents are omitted in this paper.…”

“…Hence, the remote-copilot supports each singlepilot aircraft successively, of which he can serve 4-6 aircraft during departure/arrival (Koltz et al 2015). During the cruise, the single-pilot is supported remotely as needs arise (Schmid and Korn 2017). The pilot on the aircraft can call for assistance or take-over of control via the remote-copilot call lever in any phase of flight.…”

“…They would need to perform their jobs in a shift of several months to keep their skills up to date as well as annual refresher training and testing. The entire design approach assumes reliable and secure data-links with backups as a necessary prerequisite (Schmid and Korn 2018).…”

Managing a Data-link Failure of a Single-piloted Airliner during Flight: A System-Theoretic Process Analysis

“…In SPO, we consider a MMS to be available to react to a data-link loss of all kinds, because no data-link can be completely reliable. Any data-link loss critically affects the complex sociotechnical system's resilience in network architecture terms (Schmid & Korn, 2018). The single-piloted airliner's system resilience becomes more vulnerable to any hazardous intrusions on the flight deck because no redundant human ground-based support is available anymore.…”