In commercial aviation, there are two teams at work during flight: cockpit crew and cabin crew. The former being led by the captain who also has the overall responsibility of the flight, with the first officer/co-pilot as a member in the cockpit. The purser leads the flight attendants in the cabin. The formal leadership roles …
Category: Human Factors
Old Facts, New Insights – Lessons from A-320 Part 4
This interesting study by Sarter and Woods revealed that the automation surprises “occur when the crew detects that automation or aircraft behaviour is deviating from their expectations” [2]. In turn, such ‘surprises’ provide the vital opportunity (and learning) to correct unexpected or undesirable aircraft behaviour.
Old Facts, New Insights – Lessons from A-320 Part 3
A spate of incidents and accidents during 1990s suggested that pilots flying modern ‘glass cockpit’ aircraft “sometimes fail to detect unanticipated and undesirable automation behaviour in time to recover” [2, 8, 9]. Hence it is important to understand the likelihood of human error for the A-320 pilots monitoring the status and behaviour of the automated …
Old Facts, New Insights – Lessons from A-320 Part 2
The details of the automation surprises faced by the pilots participating in the questionnaire survey is presented hereafter [2].
Old Facts, New Insights – Lessons from A-320
Automation surprises result from an imbalance between ‘autonomy’ and ‘authority’ of advanced automated systems and the gaps in the operator’s mental model of the system and its interactions. The vital factor at play in such cases could be low observability interfaces in novel (“nonroutine elements”) situations with operator caught in a bind while trying to …