Performance-Based Situational Awareness. The goal of the program supported by Boeing is to identify effective measures of situation awareness that can be used in operational environments. Specifically, no overt, SA-specific response is required of the subject and no interruption of task performance is required. Therefore, problems associated with altering the nature of the task by interrupting its performance are avoided. The goal of our work is to develop a practical tool for SA measurement that can be optimized in terms of the scope of the measure.
Automation has the potential to significantly enhance the safety and efficiency of aviation.
However a series of studies performed by Wiener and his colleagues at NASA Ames identified a number of human factors problems. The major problems involved areas where change to a preplanned set of actions were required. Corporate aviation, with its mission of efficiency, needs the advantages that automation promises, but its basic mission requires constant change. Therefore it was hypothesized that corporate aviation was an ideal place to utilize in studies on the effect of automation. In general the study used three data collection techniques to cover all aspects of automation and corporate cockpits including questionnaires, flight observations and simulator observations.