Human beings make and usually detect errors routinely. The same mental processes that allow human... more Human beings make and usually detect errors routinely. The same mental processes that allow humans to cope with novel problems can also lead to error. Bill Rouse has argued that errors are not inherently bad but their consequences may be. He proposes the development of error-tolerant systems that detect errors and take steps to prevent the consequences of the error from occurring. Research should be done on self and automatic detection of random and unanticipated errors. For self detection, displays should be developed that make the consequences of errors immediately apparent. For example, electronic map displays graphically show the consequences of horizontal flight plan entry errors. Vertical profile displays should be developed to make apparent vertical flight planning errors. Other concepts such as energy circles could also help the crew detect gross flight planning errors. For automatic detection, systems should be developed that can track pilot activity, infer pilot intent and...
Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 2005
Controller workload has been a focal topic in air traffic management research because it is consi... more Controller workload has been a focal topic in air traffic management research because it is considered a key limiting factor to capacity increase in air traffic operations. Because workload ratings are subjective and highly prone to individual differences, some researchers have tried to replace workload with more objective metrics, such as aircraft count. A significant caveat in substituting these metrics for workload ratings, however, is that their relationships are non-linear. For example, as the number of aircraft increases linearly, the controller's perceived workload jumps from low to high at a certain traffic threshold, resulting in a stepfunction increase in workload with respect to aircraft count, suggesting that controllers perceive workload categorically. The non-linear relationship between workload and aircraft count has been validated using data collected from a recent study on the En Route Free Maneuvering concept element (Lee, Prevot, Mercer, Smith, & Palmer, 2005)...
... Everett Palmer NASA-Ames Research Center Moffett Field CA ABSTRACT ... The largest difference... more ... Everett Palmer NASA-Ames Research Center Moffett Field CA ABSTRACT ... The largest difference was between encounters 1 through 8 (mean SEP=I .25) and encounters 9 and 10 (meanSEP=1 .81) . These differences largely reflect the differences in programmed separation. ...
The Multi-function Control and Display Unit (MCDU) has been identified as a source of issues pilo... more The Multi-function Control and Display Unit (MCDU) has been identified as a source of issues pilots have transitioning to glass cockpits. Several aircraft manufacturers and avion-ics vendors have committed to replace the MCDU with graphical user-interfaces in the next generation of commer-cial aircraft. A cognitive task analysis of pilot-MCDU interaction, de-scribed in this paper, has identified that pilot failure to com-plete mission tasks using the MCDU is not a sole conse-quence of the physical dimensions or layout of the device. Instead, the MCDU interface works adequately when a given pilot task: (1) is supported directly by a function provided by the automation, and (2) the access of MCDU pages, and format and entry of data, are prompted by labels and other visual cues (and not by memorized actions sequences). Pilot tasks not supported directly by automation, and/or pilots tasks that rely on memorized action sequences are difficult to learn and likely not to be used effectivel...
Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 2014
This study explored the ability of operators to provide separation between three unmanned aircraf... more This study explored the ability of operators to provide separation between three unmanned aircraft using basic cockpit traffic displays. Four groups of three general aviation, instrument-rated pilots flew cross-country flights controlling simulated twin-engine unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). They were required to maintain 2 nautical miles (nmi) horizontal and 500 ft vertical separation from all other aircraft. To examine the effect of two important safety factors, the flights were conducted with and without communication among the operators and with and without variable accuracy in the displayed traffic location due to degraded sensor quality. Twenty four different three-dimensional traffic conflict trajectories with three UASs, were repeated randomly for each of the four experimental conditions for each group. Of the 1152 aircraft encounters 12.8% were in violation of separation minimums. Eighteen of these were closer than 400 ft vertically or 1.6 nmi horizontally. The minimum sep...
A computer graphics system was programmed to display to the pilot a dynamic perspective view of a... more A computer graphics system was programmed to display to the pilot a dynamic perspective view of an airport terminal area comprised of 1200 points of light. The advantages of this system are that it has high resolution and it eliminates the camera optics and electromechanical servos of TV-model systems. The disadvantages are that it lacks fine ground texture and has a small computational delay. A brief experimental evaluation was conducted in which eight airline pilots made 50 landings each in a fixed-based simulation of a DC-8 transport. They were instructed to touch down at 0.6 m/sec. The vertical velocity of the aircraft at touchdown was displayed to the pilot at the completion of each run. Their average vertical velocity at touchdown for the last 10 landings was about 0.8 m/sec. This performance was similar to that obtained on current TV-model systems.
We have computed the unsteady three-dimensional low Reynolds number ow past a tapered cylinder. T... more We have computed the unsteady three-dimensional low Reynolds number ow past a tapered cylinder. The spanwise variation in natural shedding frequency re-sults in interesting three-dimensional ow phenomena. Our computed hot-wire and spectral data are very simi-lar to ...
This paper proposes a model-based training program for the skills necessary to operate advance av... more This paper proposes a model-based training program for the skills necessary to operate advance avionics systems that incorporate advanced autopilots and fight management systems. The training model is based on a formalism, the operational procedure model, that represents the ...
A human-in-the-loop simulation evaluated decision support tools and display enhancements for term... more A human-in-the-loop simulation evaluated decision support tools and display enhancements for terminal-area controllers managing high-density traffic flying Optimized Profile Descents along Area Navigation routes. Twelve trials compared nominal operations with and without prototype decision support tools and displays for two treatment levels of traffic scenario and forecast wind errors; four additional trials investigated the role of an ‘arrival planner ’ who could issue path adjustments to aircraft as they entered the terminal area under off-nominal conditions. The results indicate that while the prototype decision support tools enabled improved schedule and route conformance, and did not increase workload, they also did not significantly improve throughput or eliminate inter-arrival spacing errors at the runway threshold. The arrival planner enabled large delays to be absorbed in the terminal area, but reduced the effectiveness of the display enhancements for downstream controllers.
analysis of interactions involving human operators and new automation tools. Research is explorin... more analysis of interactions involving human operators and new automation tools. Research is exploring how air-ground simulations with embedded agents can complement human-in-theloop simulations for this purpose. This paper describes research toward integrating computational air traffic controller agents into a large-scale distributed simulation in the Airspace Operations Laboratory (AOL) at NASA Ames Research Center. Before detailing the agent model and architecture and discussing simulation integration issues, the paper describes a methodology for using agents to understand human-system integration issues and illustrates how the methodology can be applied to an example concept. I.
Advances in aircraft automation, air traffic control automation, communication, and surveillance ... more Advances in aircraft automation, air traffic control automation, communication, and surveillance systems provide the means for more efficient future Air Traffic Management (ATM).
Since its founding, NASA has been dedicated to the advancement of aeronautics and space science. ... more Since its founding, NASA has been dedicated to the advancement of aeronautics and space science. The NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Program Office plays a key part in helping NASA maintain this important role. The NASA STI Program Office is operated by Langley Research Center, the lead center for NASA’s scientific and technical information. The NASA STI Program Office provides access to the NASA STI Database, the largest collection of aeronautical and space science STI in the world. The Program Office is also NASA’s institutional mechanism for disseminating the results of its research and development activities. These results are published by NASA in the NASA STI Report Series, which includes the following report types: TECHNICAL PUBLICATION. Reports of completed research or a major significant phase of research that present the results of NASA programs and include extensive data or theoretical analysis. Includes compilations of significant scientific and technical ...
Aviation and cognitive science researchers have identified situations in which the pilot's ex... more Aviation and cognitive science researchers have identified situations in which the pilot's expectations for behavior of autopilot avionics are not matched by the actual behavior of the avionics. These "automation surprises" have been attributed to differences between the pilot's model of the behavior of the avionics and the actual behavior encoded in the avionics software. A formal technique is described for the analysis and measurement of the behavior of the cruise pitch modes of a modern Autopilot. The analysis characterizes the behavior of the Autopilot as situation-action rules. The behavior of the cruise pitch mode logic for a contemporary modern Autopilot was found to include 177 rules, including Level Change (23), Vertical Speed (16), Altitude Capture (50), and Altitude Hold (88). These rules are determined based on the values of 62 inputs. Analysis of the rule-based model also shed light on the factors cited in the literature as contributors to "automa...
Current Flight Management Systems (FMS) do a good job of constructing and flying an optimal traje... more Current Flight Management Systems (FMS) do a good job of constructing and flying an optimal trajectory for a single aircraft. Unfortunately, flight crews are often unable to fly these FMS routes during arrivals at busy airports. The Center TRACON Automation System (CTAS) has been designed to aid Center and TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control) controllers in assigning runways, sequencing and vectoring all classes of aircraft. CTAS bases its advisories on trajectory predictions for arriving aircraft using algorithms very similar to those in airborne FMS systems. This paper presents near and far term operational concepts for how a ground ATM (air traffic management) automation system like CTAS could work more effectively with the airborne automation in FMS equipped aircraft. The concepts for a more compatible air-ground system include: 1) a common route databases for both CTAS and FMS; 2) datalink to downlink information on aircraft weight, final approach speed and trajectory inten...
A cognitive engineering analysis of the Flight Management System Vertical Navigation (VNAV) funct... more A cognitive engineering analysis of the Flight Management System Vertical Navigation (VNAV) function has identified functional overloading of the VNAV function user-interface. Functional overloading of input and display feedback devices are well known sources of operator confusion and explain, in part, the operational issues experienced by airline pilots using VNAV in descent and approach. In this paper, a proposal to modify the existing VNAV design to eliminate the functional overloading is discussed. The proposed design improves a pilot's situational awareness of the VNAV function, potentially reduces the cost of software development, and improves safety.
Research projects on enabling trajectory-based 4D operations have had limited success in the past... more Research projects on enabling trajectory-based 4D operations have had limited success in the past causing tendencies to abandon the idea of “absolute” time-based operations in favor of “relative” aircraftto-aircraft based operations. Over the past five years researchers at NASA Ames Research Center have matured a concept of trajectory-oriented time-based arrival management in a number of human-in-theloop simulation studies. Data gathered in recent experiments reflect the potential benefits envisioned for the concept. Inter-arrival time variability has been significantly reduced. More aircraft were able to conduct energy-efficient descents during a reduced flight time. Controller workload at the busiest sector was reduced; with some workload shifted to less busy sectors. Objective and subjective data were analyzed to provide recommendations for ground-based automation that enables trajectory-oriented operations with its associated benefits. These operations can facilitate and be comp...
Human beings make and usually detect errors routinely. The same mental processes that allow human... more Human beings make and usually detect errors routinely. The same mental processes that allow humans to cope with novel problems can also lead to error. Bill Rouse has argued that errors are not inherently bad but their consequences may be. He proposes the development of error-tolerant systems that detect errors and take steps to prevent the consequences of the error from occurring. Research should be done on self and automatic detection of random and unanticipated errors. For self detection, displays should be developed that make the consequences of errors immediately apparent. For example, electronic map displays graphically show the consequences of horizontal flight plan entry errors. Vertical profile displays should be developed to make apparent vertical flight planning errors. Other concepts such as energy circles could also help the crew detect gross flight planning errors. For automatic detection, systems should be developed that can track pilot activity, infer pilot intent and...
Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 2005
Controller workload has been a focal topic in air traffic management research because it is consi... more Controller workload has been a focal topic in air traffic management research because it is considered a key limiting factor to capacity increase in air traffic operations. Because workload ratings are subjective and highly prone to individual differences, some researchers have tried to replace workload with more objective metrics, such as aircraft count. A significant caveat in substituting these metrics for workload ratings, however, is that their relationships are non-linear. For example, as the number of aircraft increases linearly, the controller's perceived workload jumps from low to high at a certain traffic threshold, resulting in a stepfunction increase in workload with respect to aircraft count, suggesting that controllers perceive workload categorically. The non-linear relationship between workload and aircraft count has been validated using data collected from a recent study on the En Route Free Maneuvering concept element (Lee, Prevot, Mercer, Smith, & Palmer, 2005)...
... Everett Palmer NASA-Ames Research Center Moffett Field CA ABSTRACT ... The largest difference... more ... Everett Palmer NASA-Ames Research Center Moffett Field CA ABSTRACT ... The largest difference was between encounters 1 through 8 (mean SEP=I .25) and encounters 9 and 10 (meanSEP=1 .81) . These differences largely reflect the differences in programmed separation. ...
The Multi-function Control and Display Unit (MCDU) has been identified as a source of issues pilo... more The Multi-function Control and Display Unit (MCDU) has been identified as a source of issues pilots have transitioning to glass cockpits. Several aircraft manufacturers and avion-ics vendors have committed to replace the MCDU with graphical user-interfaces in the next generation of commer-cial aircraft. A cognitive task analysis of pilot-MCDU interaction, de-scribed in this paper, has identified that pilot failure to com-plete mission tasks using the MCDU is not a sole conse-quence of the physical dimensions or layout of the device. Instead, the MCDU interface works adequately when a given pilot task: (1) is supported directly by a function provided by the automation, and (2) the access of MCDU pages, and format and entry of data, are prompted by labels and other visual cues (and not by memorized actions sequences). Pilot tasks not supported directly by automation, and/or pilots tasks that rely on memorized action sequences are difficult to learn and likely not to be used effectivel...
Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 2014
This study explored the ability of operators to provide separation between three unmanned aircraf... more This study explored the ability of operators to provide separation between three unmanned aircraft using basic cockpit traffic displays. Four groups of three general aviation, instrument-rated pilots flew cross-country flights controlling simulated twin-engine unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). They were required to maintain 2 nautical miles (nmi) horizontal and 500 ft vertical separation from all other aircraft. To examine the effect of two important safety factors, the flights were conducted with and without communication among the operators and with and without variable accuracy in the displayed traffic location due to degraded sensor quality. Twenty four different three-dimensional traffic conflict trajectories with three UASs, were repeated randomly for each of the four experimental conditions for each group. Of the 1152 aircraft encounters 12.8% were in violation of separation minimums. Eighteen of these were closer than 400 ft vertically or 1.6 nmi horizontally. The minimum sep...
A computer graphics system was programmed to display to the pilot a dynamic perspective view of a... more A computer graphics system was programmed to display to the pilot a dynamic perspective view of an airport terminal area comprised of 1200 points of light. The advantages of this system are that it has high resolution and it eliminates the camera optics and electromechanical servos of TV-model systems. The disadvantages are that it lacks fine ground texture and has a small computational delay. A brief experimental evaluation was conducted in which eight airline pilots made 50 landings each in a fixed-based simulation of a DC-8 transport. They were instructed to touch down at 0.6 m/sec. The vertical velocity of the aircraft at touchdown was displayed to the pilot at the completion of each run. Their average vertical velocity at touchdown for the last 10 landings was about 0.8 m/sec. This performance was similar to that obtained on current TV-model systems.
We have computed the unsteady three-dimensional low Reynolds number ow past a tapered cylinder. T... more We have computed the unsteady three-dimensional low Reynolds number ow past a tapered cylinder. The spanwise variation in natural shedding frequency re-sults in interesting three-dimensional ow phenomena. Our computed hot-wire and spectral data are very simi-lar to ...
This paper proposes a model-based training program for the skills necessary to operate advance av... more This paper proposes a model-based training program for the skills necessary to operate advance avionics systems that incorporate advanced autopilots and fight management systems. The training model is based on a formalism, the operational procedure model, that represents the ...
A human-in-the-loop simulation evaluated decision support tools and display enhancements for term... more A human-in-the-loop simulation evaluated decision support tools and display enhancements for terminal-area controllers managing high-density traffic flying Optimized Profile Descents along Area Navigation routes. Twelve trials compared nominal operations with and without prototype decision support tools and displays for two treatment levels of traffic scenario and forecast wind errors; four additional trials investigated the role of an ‘arrival planner ’ who could issue path adjustments to aircraft as they entered the terminal area under off-nominal conditions. The results indicate that while the prototype decision support tools enabled improved schedule and route conformance, and did not increase workload, they also did not significantly improve throughput or eliminate inter-arrival spacing errors at the runway threshold. The arrival planner enabled large delays to be absorbed in the terminal area, but reduced the effectiveness of the display enhancements for downstream controllers.
analysis of interactions involving human operators and new automation tools. Research is explorin... more analysis of interactions involving human operators and new automation tools. Research is exploring how air-ground simulations with embedded agents can complement human-in-theloop simulations for this purpose. This paper describes research toward integrating computational air traffic controller agents into a large-scale distributed simulation in the Airspace Operations Laboratory (AOL) at NASA Ames Research Center. Before detailing the agent model and architecture and discussing simulation integration issues, the paper describes a methodology for using agents to understand human-system integration issues and illustrates how the methodology can be applied to an example concept. I.
Advances in aircraft automation, air traffic control automation, communication, and surveillance ... more Advances in aircraft automation, air traffic control automation, communication, and surveillance systems provide the means for more efficient future Air Traffic Management (ATM).
Since its founding, NASA has been dedicated to the advancement of aeronautics and space science. ... more Since its founding, NASA has been dedicated to the advancement of aeronautics and space science. The NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Program Office plays a key part in helping NASA maintain this important role. The NASA STI Program Office is operated by Langley Research Center, the lead center for NASA’s scientific and technical information. The NASA STI Program Office provides access to the NASA STI Database, the largest collection of aeronautical and space science STI in the world. The Program Office is also NASA’s institutional mechanism for disseminating the results of its research and development activities. These results are published by NASA in the NASA STI Report Series, which includes the following report types: TECHNICAL PUBLICATION. Reports of completed research or a major significant phase of research that present the results of NASA programs and include extensive data or theoretical analysis. Includes compilations of significant scientific and technical ...
Aviation and cognitive science researchers have identified situations in which the pilot's ex... more Aviation and cognitive science researchers have identified situations in which the pilot's expectations for behavior of autopilot avionics are not matched by the actual behavior of the avionics. These "automation surprises" have been attributed to differences between the pilot's model of the behavior of the avionics and the actual behavior encoded in the avionics software. A formal technique is described for the analysis and measurement of the behavior of the cruise pitch modes of a modern Autopilot. The analysis characterizes the behavior of the Autopilot as situation-action rules. The behavior of the cruise pitch mode logic for a contemporary modern Autopilot was found to include 177 rules, including Level Change (23), Vertical Speed (16), Altitude Capture (50), and Altitude Hold (88). These rules are determined based on the values of 62 inputs. Analysis of the rule-based model also shed light on the factors cited in the literature as contributors to "automa...
Current Flight Management Systems (FMS) do a good job of constructing and flying an optimal traje... more Current Flight Management Systems (FMS) do a good job of constructing and flying an optimal trajectory for a single aircraft. Unfortunately, flight crews are often unable to fly these FMS routes during arrivals at busy airports. The Center TRACON Automation System (CTAS) has been designed to aid Center and TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control) controllers in assigning runways, sequencing and vectoring all classes of aircraft. CTAS bases its advisories on trajectory predictions for arriving aircraft using algorithms very similar to those in airborne FMS systems. This paper presents near and far term operational concepts for how a ground ATM (air traffic management) automation system like CTAS could work more effectively with the airborne automation in FMS equipped aircraft. The concepts for a more compatible air-ground system include: 1) a common route databases for both CTAS and FMS; 2) datalink to downlink information on aircraft weight, final approach speed and trajectory inten...
A cognitive engineering analysis of the Flight Management System Vertical Navigation (VNAV) funct... more A cognitive engineering analysis of the Flight Management System Vertical Navigation (VNAV) function has identified functional overloading of the VNAV function user-interface. Functional overloading of input and display feedback devices are well known sources of operator confusion and explain, in part, the operational issues experienced by airline pilots using VNAV in descent and approach. In this paper, a proposal to modify the existing VNAV design to eliminate the functional overloading is discussed. The proposed design improves a pilot's situational awareness of the VNAV function, potentially reduces the cost of software development, and improves safety.
Research projects on enabling trajectory-based 4D operations have had limited success in the past... more Research projects on enabling trajectory-based 4D operations have had limited success in the past causing tendencies to abandon the idea of “absolute” time-based operations in favor of “relative” aircraftto-aircraft based operations. Over the past five years researchers at NASA Ames Research Center have matured a concept of trajectory-oriented time-based arrival management in a number of human-in-theloop simulation studies. Data gathered in recent experiments reflect the potential benefits envisioned for the concept. Inter-arrival time variability has been significantly reduced. More aircraft were able to conduct energy-efficient descents during a reduced flight time. Controller workload at the busiest sector was reduced; with some workload shifted to less busy sectors. Objective and subjective data were analyzed to provide recommendations for ground-based automation that enables trajectory-oriented operations with its associated benefits. These operations can facilitate and be comp...
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Papers by Everett Palmer