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On the Transition and Migration of Flight Functions in the Airspace SystemSince ~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 over-reliance 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.
Document ID
20120016532
Acquisition Source
Langley Research Center
Document Type
Conference Paper
Authors
Morris, Allan Terry (NASA Langley Research Center Hampton, VA, United States)
Young, Steve D. (NASA Langley Research Center Hampton, VA, United States)
Date Acquired
August 26, 2013
Publication Date
October 14, 2012
Subject Category
Air Transportation And Safety
Report/Patent Number
NF1676L-14534
Meeting Information
Meeting: 31st Digital Avionics Systems Conference
Location: Williamsburg, VA
Country: United States
Start Date: October 14, 2012
End Date: October 18, 2012
Funding Number(s)
WBS: WBS 284848.02.03.07.03
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.

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