Realtime systems, especially those which are are life critical, represent an area where problems are of particular import. The incorporation of advanced flight automation systems into modern aircraft has resulted an increase in errors in interaction with aircraft automation. Numerous accidents and incidents have been traced to interaction problems including aircraft hull losses at Nagoya, Strasbourg and Bangalore. Approach The current approach is to attempt to create a representation of automation which is more accessible to the operator, and to acknowledge and design to the limitations of a human operator during design. An early accomplishment has been the identification of non-nominal operations as an area of automation which must be carefully examined.
Pilot create mental models of automation based on experiential interaction.
Compared to other automation systems, clear mental models of flight operations, which are time critical, are particularly important. The latter has a more completely specified representation of its behavior and showed significantly better predictability. Another innovative web-based experiment was completed which attempted to ascertain whether subject performance could be influenced by the the form in which a system was specified. Results of this experiment were inconclusive. Current Activities Current work involves examining functional specifications of automation to determine the level at which such systems can be abstracted to the operator.