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Meeting	ACGS Committee Meeting 115 - Portland, OR - March 2015
Agenda Location	6 SUBCOMMITTEE E – FLIGHT, PROPULSION, AND AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE CONTROL SYSTEMS 6.2 Single Pilot Operations for Commercial Aircraft – Concept of Operations and Technology Needs
Title	Single Pilot Operations for Commercial Aircraft – Concept of Operations and Technology Needs
Presenter	Walter Johnson
Affiliation	NASA Ames
Available Downloads*	presentation
	Downloads are available to members who are logged in and either Active* or attended this meeting.
Abstract	Reduced Crew / Single Pilot Operations for Commercial Aircraft – Concept of Operations and Technology Needs Walter W. Johnson NASA Ames Research Center In 2012, NASA began exploring the feasibility of single pilot operations (SPO) in the context of scheduled passenger air carrier operations (i.e., Parts 121 and 125). Technology and automation, especially aircraft automation, have significantly advanced in the 21st century and may be enabling to SPO. However, a move to SPO also has significant challenges. The purpose of this three-year NASA effort was to identify those challenges through workshops, analytic studies, and human-in-the-loop simulations assessing promising concepts and prototype solutions. While much of the work over the last three years focused on SPO, there were also implications for reduced crew operations (RCO; going to two pilots in operations where three or four are currently required such as long haul flights). Further, much of the work suggested pathways for improving safety and efficiency in current operations. Therefore we use “SPO” or “RCO” according to the context in which the work was done. Two workshops held on two continents pooled together experts in the US and Europe to discuss the challenges involved in implementing SPO/RCO. A three-day workshop on SPO held at NASA Ames in April 2012 yielded a list of issues including authority and accountability, communication, certification, aircraft design, workload, acceptance by stakeholders and the public, training, NextGen impact, crew resource management (CRM), and safety and security. Participants at the NASA workshop also discussed the feasibility of various potential configurations and distributions of roles and responsibilities between air and ground crew and between human and automation. To determine whether minimal crew complement can be further reduced, it was important to determine what present day operations involve. To that end, several task analysis studies were conducted. Schutte (2015) enumerated all of the flight deck tasks performed by the Pilot Flying (PF) and the Pilot Monitoring (PM) and identified situations that could negatively impact SPO. Wolter and Gore (2013, 2014) performed a preliminary high-level task analysis of both current day and SPO environments of specific scenarios, with validations provided by interviews with subject matter experts (SMEs). Mosier and Fisher (2014) conducted an extensive literature review on CRM training, practices, and procedures giving considerations to how they might apply (or not) in SPO. Wilson, Harron, Lyall, Hoffa, and Jones (2013) reviewed the current certification requirements and practices for Parts 121, 125, and 135 operations. After assessing the state of art and practice in automation, air-ground communication and collaboration, and practices like CRM, a solution space was laid out. This space covered a range of aircraft modifications from current flight decks, retrofits, and entirely new designs. Similarly, it covered a range of possible ground support including current air traffic control and dispatch, full time, part-time, and on-demand ground assistance, and remotely flying the aircraft. Within the solution space several promising concepts were chosen and prototypes and procedures were developed, and four human-in-the-loop (HITL) studies were conducted to assess the effectiveness and further sort out and identify issues. The Single Pilot Operations Observational Study (SPOOS) assessed the ability of a single pilot to fly with no additional assistance. Two pilots flew a full mission simulation together and separately. Not surprisingly, workload and errors were both higher when the pilots flew alone, however, all errors were minor and both pilots rated the workload as manageable. SPO I compared crew decision-making and communication between crews that were collocated in a single cockpit and crews that were separated. The study utilized high workload off-nominal scenarios requiring diversion decisions. Most pilots preferred flying together, and they rated the separate condition more poorly for safety of flight, communication and coordination, even though little difference in objective performance was found between the two conditions. An analysis of the pilots’ interactions found many more incidents involving confusion about what the other pilot was doing in the separate condition than in the together condition. With these findings and further feedback from the participants, collaboration tools were developed to facilitate remote collaboration and help pilots become more aware of actions taken by each other. In SPO II, we attempted to differentiate the roles of the two pilots, one as the airborne captain, and the other in a ground-based hybrid pilot/dispatch role, performing limited airline dispatch functions and first officer functions in cases of high workload or off-nominal situations. SPO II also implemented and evaluated the collaboration tools developed based on SPO I results. These tools included “CRM indicators,” which were touch sensitive LCD panels, as a mechanism for tracking responsibility, actions and acknowledgements. In addition to the CRM indicators, pilots were provided a video feed allowing observation of each other’s actions, and shared charts. Feedback on all three tools (CRM indicators, video, and shared charts) was generally positive although pilots had multiple suggestions for improvement. This study utilized even higher workload variants of the scenarios developed for SPO I. SPO III examined the importance of giving opportunities to a ground operator to acquire situation awareness (SA) prior to being called on to assist an aircraft. In this study, a ground operator acted as a dispatcher, until one of his aircraft had an off-nominal situation, at which point he entered “dedicated assistance,” that is he assumed the role of first officer, and handed off his other aircraft. The study employed high workload diversion scenarios similar to those used in SPO II. Results provided no evidence that a ground operator’s lack of initial SA when called on for dedicated assistance has any effect on workload or even SA once the ground operator enters dedicated assistance. With appropriate displays, ground operators were able to jump in and provide assistance, even if they had minimal SA prior to getting a request. The outcome of the aforementioned effort is a set of potential concepts of operations that could enable both SPO and RCO – with further development and research and a plan for this research and development.