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published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

A significant number of aircraft incidents and accidents have been caused, in part, by flightcrew failure to properly manage cockpit activities, such as failure to initiate activities at the appropriate time, misprioritization of activities, or the failure to appropriately monitor activities and terminate them when required. To facilitate the management of the cockpit activities, a computational aid, the Agenda Manager (AM) has been developed for use in simulated cockpit environments in an investigation which was one aspect of a more extensive research project supported by the NASA Ames Research Center. The AM is directed at the management of goals and functions, the actors who perform those functions, and the resources used by these actors. Development of an earlier AM version, the Cockpit Task Management System (CTMS), demonstrated that it could be used to assist flightcrews in the improvement of cockpit activity management under experimental conditions, assuming that the AM determined pilot goals accurately as well as the functions performed to achieve those goals. To overcome AM limitations based on that assumption, a pilot goal communication method (GCM) was developed to facilitate accurate recognition of pilot goals. Embedded within AM, the GCM was used to recognize pilot goals and to declare them to the AM. Two approaches to the recognition of pilots goals were considered: (1) The use of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system to recognize overtly or explicitly declared pilot goals, and (2) inference of covertly or implicitly declared pilot goals via use of an intent inferencing mechanism. These two methods were integrated into the AM to provide a rich environment for the study of human-machine interactions in the supervisory control of complex dynamic systems. Through simulated flight environment experimentation, the proposed GCM has demonstrated its capability to accurately recognize pilot goals and to handle incorrectly declared goals, and was validated in terms of subjective workload and pilot flight control performance. / Graduation date: 1997

The flightcrew of a modern airliner operates in a multi-tasking environment with several tasks competing for the same attentional resources at the same time. Too many tasks vying for the crew's attention concurrently imposes a heavy workload on the flightcrew. This results in the satisfactory execution of some tasks at the expense of others. Consequently, flightcrews must manage cockpit tasks a process we call Cockpit Task Management (CTM). Funk (1991) defines cockpit task management (CTM) as the process flightcrews use to prioritize cockpit tasks, allocate required resources, initiate and terminate multiple concurrent tasks. Despite improvements in aircraft reliability and advancements in aircraft cockpit automation, "pilot error" is cited as the main reason (over 60% of all aircraft accidents) for planes still falling out of the skies. One of the objectives of this research was to determine the significance of CTM errors in "pilot errors". Having established its significance, the next step was to refine the existing error taxonomy of Chou & Funk (1991). A structured error classification methodology was also developed for classifying CTM errors and validated using 470 Aviation safety Reporting System (ASRS) airline incident reports. This study identified CTM errors as a significant component of "pilot errors" accounting for 231 of the 470 incidents analyzed (49.2%). While Task Initiation errors accounted for the largest of the general error categories (41.5%), it was the Task Prioritization errors (35% of general and specific error categories) that unlocked the door that led to error committals in the other error categories. Task Prioritization errors led to Resource allocation errors which, in turn, resulted in several kinds of errors being committed in the other categories. The findings had implications that were largely training-based. In particular, the importance of pilot education which CTM provides (as opposed to crew training that CRM provides) is emphasized. The incorporation of formal CTM concept into existing CRM training programs was advocated. In addition, a staggered scheduling mechanism in crew training agenda involving CTM, CRM, Line-Oriented-Flight-Training (LOFT) and simulator sessions was suggested. A recommendation was made for a comprehensive Cockpit Task Management System (CTMS) to be installed in the cockpit to help crews to prioritize tasks and remind them of the need to initiate, terminate or reprioritize tasks as necessary. The inclusion of Air Traffic Control personnel in flightcrew training sessions was also recommended. / Graduation date: 1994

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