REPORTS | Weather in the Cockpit
The FAA Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) is most often discussed in connection with changes in navigation technology. This report looks at another side of NextGen: weather information and its accessibility.
BOOKS | The Handbook of Operator Fatigue
While this book was being compiled, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration was investigating three cases of air traffic controllers falling asleep on duty between January and April 2011. A university sleep specialist was quoted in a newspaper article suggesting that controllers on night shifts should be allowed to take brief restorative naps.
REPORTS
Need to Know
Weather in the Cockpit: Priorities, Sources, Delivery, and Needs in the Next Generation Air Transport System
Schvaneveldt, Roger W.; Branaghan, Russell J.; Lamonica, John; Beringer, Dennis B. U.S Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Civil Aerospace Medical Institute (CAMI). DOT/FAA/AM-12/7. July 2012. 33 pp. Figures, tables, references.
The FAA Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) is most often discussed in connection with changes in navigation technology. This report looks at another side of NextGen: weather information and its accessibility.
“From a human factors perspective, it is vital that pilots and controllers have the right information at the right time,” the report says. “These goals, along with a concern over the potential problem of ‘too much information,’ lead to the suggestion that weather information systems should provide information focused on the safety of flight. The information should be presented in a meaningfully integrated way, reflecting all types of weather and all sources of weather information.”
The research project that led to the report was intended to document pilot needs for weather information, focusing on general aviation and scheduled air carriers, in preparation for the switch to NextGen. When NextGen is fully operational, pilots will not only be able to perform point-to-point navigation without being limited to the legacy airways, but “will be responsible for obtaining information about weather and adjusting their flight to accommodate these factors.”
Providing near-real-time weather information to pilots and crews is known as “weather in the cockpit,” the report says, quoting the FAA’s concept: “Weather in the cockpit means we employ the aircraft as a node in the National Airspace System’s communications, navigation and surveillance network. [It also means we] enable flight deck weather information technologies that allow pilots and aircrews to engage in shared situational awareness and shared responsibilities with controllers, dispatchers, flight service station specialists and others, pertaining to preflight, en route and post-flight aviation safety decisions involving weather.”
Combining a review of the research literature and a new detailed study, the report’s authors analyze weather hazards and their degree of priority at the sharp end. “The pilot’s workload would be lighter if the information provided led directly to decisions rather than requiring interpretation and inference to arrive at the needed information,” the report says.
“Ideally, weather information systems might directly indicate critical information, e.g., the location and severity of thunderstorms,” the report says. “In general, the priority of weather factors together with the state of the factors in the world determines the criticality of each factor. For example, density altitude is particularly important when the temperature is high or, more generally, when the density altitude becomes too high for safe operations. Thus, density altitude only needs to be displayed when it is above the safety-critical level.”
Context-specific weather information would also take into account the phase of flight. In an adaptation of earlier research by Beringer and Schvaneveldt, weather factors are cross-tabulated by the phases — planning, departure, cruise and arrival — to calculate numerical priorities, with 1 the highest.
“Aside from the planning phase, which is usually accomplished without severe time pressure, pilot concern with weather is greatest in the arrival phase (20 factors with priority 1), followed by departure (13 factors with priority 1),” the report says. “These are the times during flight when workload is highest.”
Consequently, the report advocates a “need to know” criterion for information display.
“Too much information can make it difficult to locate safety-critical information,” the report says. “An exhaustive presentation of all the weather from every possible source (including other aircraft) can easily hinder the ability to locate the information relevant to a particular flight at a particular time. … What is needed are integrated systems providing safety-critical information without requiring a search.”
The report recommends a combination of ground-based systems that aggregate and summarize multi-sourced information, and on-board systems capable of filtering what is relevant to the flight and presenting it to pilots with just enough detail.
Present sources of U.S. weather information are plentiful, perhaps overwhelming. Many of them originate with the National Weather Service (NWS), which maintains national and regional centers and about 122 local weather forecast offices.
Some of the NWS product is tailored for aviation: “The Aviation Digital Data Service provides aviation-related weather [data]. Each weather forecast office issues terminal aerodrome forecasts for one or more airports in their jurisdiction. … Twenty-one NWS Center Weather Service Units are collocated with the FAA ARTCCs [air route traffic control centers]. Their main responsibility is to provide up-to-the-minute weather information and briefings to the traffic management units and control-room supervisors.”
The NWS also operates a center that issues AIRMETS (airmen’s meteorological information) and SIGMETS (significant meteorological information, such as notification of thunderstorms and turbulence).
“The technology for delivering weather information is in an extremely active state of development today,” the report says. “New systems, both installed and portable, are appearing frequently.” The primary delivery systems pilots can use include the Internet, including the NWS website; VHF (very high frequency) broadcast, which carries controller-to-pilot communication and automated systems such as ATIS (automatic terminal information service); and satellite, such as AFIS (automated flight information system), Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio.
The commercial vendors that have been getting into the picture “often provide enhanced means of presenting the information in graphical form.” However, commercial sources risk overlapping NWS-provided data, the report says.
“With uncertainty over the limits to what the NWS will provide in the future, commercial innovation may be curtailed,” the report says. “There is something of a quandary here because it is vital that the government does what it can to promote the safety and welfare of its citizens, which suggests that the NWS provide information in the most effective forms. At the same time, innovation in the commercial sector should be encouraged.” Information systems designed around the needs of individual flights are more likely to be developed by private enterprise than by the government, the report says.
In addition, “many avionics systems now provide weather information and some rudimentary means of integrating the disparate types of information, such as overlays, picture-in-picture, split-screen views and zooming capabilities,” the report says. But it asks: “Do these avionics systems provide the information the pilots need, when they need it, in a useful way?”
The researchers reviewed several weather-related avionics products: the Garmin G1000 (installed in the cockpit instrument panel) and 396/496 (portable); the Honeywell-Bendix/King AV8OR (portable); L3’s SmartDeck (installed); and WxWorx (portable, for a laptop computer or tablet). These products, the report says, are designed primarily for U.S. Federal Aviation Regulations Part 91 aircraft; Part 121 carriers tend to use custom equipment. But the criteria for evaluating weather information systems could be valid for any applications. The criteria were:
- “Weather is customized by phase of flight — Different weather information should be presented or highlighted according to the phase of flight;
- “Weather source information is integrated and summarized — Weather from multiple sources should be integrated to provide the big picture, yet still enable zooming in for additional information;
- “Weather information is presented at the appropriate level of detail — Pilots should not be overwhelmed by the volume of weather information presented;
- “Hazard information is provided on an exception-only basis — Hazards should be highlighted, whereas non-hazardous weather should not be focused on unduly;
- “Weather presentation is tied to 4-D flight profile [the flight path in three-dimensional space plus time]. … Often it is more useful for the pilot to know not what the weather is like at a particular location now, but what it will be like when they get there”;
- “Probabilistic forecasts are provided and the level of uncertainty of the information is indicated; [and,]
- “Recommendations are provided about how to avoid bad weather.”
All this can be summed up as giving the pilots the gist of the situation, the report says. At any point on the 4-D flight profile, the pilot needs to be able to quickly answer questions such as these: “How dangerous is the weather?” “Why is it dangerous?” “How long will the danger continue?” “What should I do about it?”
The report provides details of the researchers’ analysis of the five weather-information systems. All the systems scored zero on two criteria, “suggestions provided to avoid bad weather” and “probabilistic information.”
The report says, “Most of the products do a good job of emphasizing hazards, indicating storms in red and so on; however, they do not tie it well to a 4-D profile. Though they provide current weather along a three-dimensional profile, they fail to provide current and forecast information along a four-dimensional profile. … None of the systems provide overt suggestions for avoiding weather hazards (i.e., possible rerouting). ARTCC controllers have historically supplied this suggestion of an alternate route, and they are not likely to continue doing so during NextGen.”
BOOKS
The Mind-Body Problem
The Handbook of Operator Fatigue
Matthews, Gerald; Desmond, Paula A.; Neubauer, Catherine; Hancock, P.A. (editors). Farnham, Surrey, England, and Burlington, Vermont, U.S.: Ashgate, 2012. 527 pp. Figures, tables, references, index.
While this book was being compiled, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration was investigating three cases of air traffic controllers falling asleep on duty between January and April 2011. A university sleep specialist was quoted in a newspaper article suggesting that controllers on night shifts should be allowed to take brief restorative naps. The same article quoted a U.S. senator: “I think that is totally bogus. There are so many professions that have to work long hours.”
The editors comment, “Clearly, science and society do not always see the problem in the same way.” Their book is a comprehensive selection of papers about how science sees the subject.
The editors describe fatigue as “one of the most puzzling enigmas in all of psychology.” Superficially, fatigue seems like a simple concept. We all know what fatigue feels like and the behavioral tendencies it encourages: sub-par task performance, irritability, forgetfulness and loss of enthusiasm.
Yet, the editors say, “Many experimental studies show the detrimental effects of fatigue, but sometimes individuals who appear to be highly fatigued continue to show normal levels of performance. The earliest systematic investigations showed that subjective feelings of fatigue do not necessarily correspond to objective performance loss. It is also challenging to identify the neural and psychological processes that mandate the impact of fatigue on performance. Fatigue, in part, reflects fundamental changes in neural function, but also depends critically on an operator’s interest in the task and the high-level cognitive processes that regulate motivation.”
Nor are the causes of fatigue as obvious as one might think. Not getting enough sleep makes us tired and craving rest or sleep — one definition of fatigue — but other sources can pitch in.
“A second source derives from the 24-hour circadian cycle in wakefulness and alertness,” the editors say. “While sleep loss and circadian rhythms are distinct influences on fatigue, they are increasingly studied together. … Models of this kind provide the basis for evaluating shift systems: night workers [such as pilots on ‘backside of the clock’ schedules] face the dual penalty of sleep deprivation alongside the loss of alertness driven by the circadian phase during which they are forced to be active.”
Other sources of fatigue cited by the editors include tasks requiring sustained attention; monotonous and high-workload performance; compromised neural functioning caused by infection, sedative drugs or nutritional deficits; loud noise; uncomfortable temperatures; even poorly designed computer displays.
“Conversely, tasks that offer high levels of challenge and intrinsic interest can be highly fatigue-resistant,” the editors say.
The papers published in The Handbook of Operator Fatigue are divided into eight sections: an introduction, “The Nature of Fatigue,” “Assessment of Fatigue,” “The Neuroscience of Fatigue,” “Performance Effects of Sleep Loss and Circadian Rhythms,” “Fatigue and Health,” “Applied Contexts for Operator Fatigue,” and “Operational Countermeasures.”