Advances in Aviation Psychology

Michael A. Vidulich,Pamela S. Tsang,John Flach

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317185222
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Psychologie
• Sous-sujet: Industrie- & Organisationspsychologie

Aviation remains one of the most active and challenging domains for human factors and applied psychology. Since 1981, the biennial International Symposium on Aviation Psychology (ISAP) has been convened for the purposes of (a) presenting the latest research on human performance problems and opportunities within aviation systems, (b) envisioning design solutions that best utilize human capabilities for creating safe and efficient aviation systems, and (c) bringing together scientists, research sponsors, and operators in an effort to bridge the gap between research and application. Though rooted in the presentations of the 17th ISAP, held in 2013 in Dayton, Ohio, Advances in Aviation Psychology is not simply a collection of selected proceeding papers. Based upon the potential impact on emerging trends, current debates or enduring issues present in their work, select authors were invited to expand on their work following the benefit of interactions at the symposium. The invited authors include the featured keynote and plenary speakers who are all leading scientists and prominent researchers that were selected to participate at the symposium. These contributions are supplemented by additional contributors whose work best reflects significant developments in aviation psychology. Consequently the volume includes visions for the next generation of air management and air traffic control, the integration of unmanned (i.e. remotely piloted vehicles) into operational air spaces, and the use of advanced information technologies (e.g. synthetic task environments) for research and training. This book is the first in a series of volumes to be published in conjunction with each subsequent ISAP. The aim of each volume is not only to report the latest findings in aviation psychology but also to suggest new directions for advancing the field.

PART I
Aviation Psychology

Chapter 1
Aviation Psychology: Optimizing Human and System Performance

Michael A. Vidulich

Air Force Research Laboratory, USA

Pamela S. Tsang & John M. Flach

Wright State University, USA

Aviation Psychology: Then and Now

This chapter provides a quick historical review of the emergence of aviation psychology as a discipline and its important role not only in aviation applications, but also in the larger domains of scientific and applied psychology. This will lead into a discussion of some of the enduring and emerging challenges confronted within aviation psychology that are featured in subsequent chapters.

Although by no means the only arena of engagement for human factors or applied psychology, aviation psychology can legitimately be considered one of the cradles and nurseries for those fields. This is not surprising because the field of aviation was one of the most visible inroads of modern technology into modern life. This visibility reflects the fact that flight was the realization of a seemingly impossible dream that stretched both human and technical capabilities to their limits.

Even before the aircraft was officially born, there was considerable variability in terms of assumptions about the role of the human pilot. For example, Lilienthal essentially bet his life on the athletic capabilities of humans to solve the control problem with catastrophic results. In contrast, Langley was so focused on engineering the aeronautical platform (that is, wings and engine) that he underestimated the need to support the piloting task with appropriate controls and training. The result was two unsuccessful launches of his aerodrome in 1903 that led to great pessimism about whether the dream of flight would ever be realized.

It could be argued that the success of the Wright brothers later that same year was due to their methodical approach to all of the challenges associated with heavier than air flight. In particular, they understood that an effective human–machine interface (that is, the control system) and appropriate training (that is, extensive experience piloting kites and gliders) was an essential complement to innovations with respect to the development of engines and wings. With continuing advances in technology and changes in concepts of air operations the debate about the role of humans in aviation systems continues to this day.

An early challenge to the viability of commercial aviation involved the challenge of maintaining stability in low visibility conditions (for example, in clouds or at night) (Previc & Ercoline, 2004). It took the pioneering work of Ocker and Crane (1932) to convince the aviation community that this reflected fundamental limits of the human ability to sense orientation. Again, success required a blend of engineering—supplemental sensors and displays (for example, an artificial horizon), and psychology—training (that is, so that the pilots learned to trust the instruments). The joint capability of the human with the technology (that is, the Sperry artificial horizon) was demonstrated in the pioneering flights of Jimmy Doolittle in 1927 and Albert Hegenberger in 1932. However, this was only the start of a long progression toward the development of appropriate instruments and training for effective instrument flight.

In the ensuing years the continued challenges of commercial and military aviation led to innovations in aeronautical systems, information systems, and in our understanding of human capabilities. Many attribute the work of the Cambridge Research Lab in the UK (led by Kenneth Craik and Frederic Bartlett) and the Aeromedical Research Lab in the US (led by Paul Fitts, see Fitts, 1947) to setting the stage for the modern fields of engineering psychology and aviation psychology. A major theme of this work was that the information processing limitations of the human components could be modeled in ways that could inform engineering decisions about the technological systems and, in particular about the interfaces between human and technology.

The challenges of the aviation domain were not simply about “piloting.” It became increasingly obvious that the aviation system included a distributed network of air and ground components. One of the earliest examples of the design of a situation display for supporting team coordination and situation awareness can be seen in the British Royal Air Force Operations Rooms from the Battle of Britain days. The development of radar is widely acknowledged to be a breakthrough technology that enabled a leap in air defense effectiveness. As World War II approached, the British had been building a coordinated air defense as a result of their World War I experience (Rawlinson, 1924). It was a system of telephone communications from human observers using binoculars and sound detectors being brought together in an “operations room” where the opponent’s movements were displayed on a large table-top map display. The commander observing this display could then use another set of telephone lines to issue orders to flak batteries (some mobile) and fighter aircraft bases to defend specified areas and routes. The British Royal Air Force used these earlier experiences and added a network of radar and telephone systems to the overall air defense system. Large table-top maps with movable physical icons were updated to reflect input from the radar displays. Air control officers observing these situation displays and defensive squadron status displays on the walls from a balcony would attempt to identify the most efficient way to deploy the limited fighter aircraft to counter them (Hough & Richards, 1989). In other words, the key to the successful air defense was the creation of the display that presented the crucial information to the decision makers and means to convey those decisions to the appropriate forces.

Following the war, the need to integrate air and ground operations continued to grow to enable groups of aircraft to accomplish their various missions in a growing expanse of space and expectation of speed. From the earliest air traffic controllers waving flags to instruct pilots when to land and take off and having only bonfires to signify air highways, to rotating light beacons and radar, to the present day satellite-based technology, air traffic control (ATC) has developed into an elaborate socio-technical system requiring collaboration among a widely distributed collection of people and technologies.

As an offshoot of aviation, the space race leveraged aviation psychology to support operations beyond the atmosphere. One of the eerie echoes from the early days of aviation was the sometimes acrimonious debate regarding the role (if any) of the human astronaut in controlling the spacecraft (Mindell, 2008). Many engineers felt that only automated systems could be trusted to deal with the unknown conditions of vehicle control in space while the pilot and astronaut communities argued for more prominent roles for the human in the astronaut–spacecraft team. For example, Charles Donlan, NASA’s Associate Director of Project Mercury, and Jack Heberlig from the Office of the Project Manager, commented on the importance of the astronaut’s role in the Mercury program: “Of utmost practical importance to future manned space flight efforts will be the quality of the astronaut’s performance in space. Accuracy of manual attitude control should provide a good test of psychomotor performance capability. Monitoring of the capsule orbital systems should provide an indication of the vigilance and perceptual accuracy. Navigation will test reasoning and visual discrimination of earth terrain features and heavenly bodies outside the capsule” (Donlan & Heberlig, 1961, p. 37). The wisdom of providing for human astronaut control was verified when on the first US orbital flight, John Glenn’s Mercury spacecraft developed a malfunctioning thruster and he was able to use the manual control to compensate (Mindell, 2008).

Debates regarding the best role allocation between humans and machines have not abated to this date (for example, Barnes & Jentsch, 2010; Billings, 1991; Parasuraman & Byrne, 2003; Tsang & Vidulich, 1989) and the issues have come to the forefront of aviation psychology with new challenges posed by the control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and the implementation of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen).

In the area of UAVs, once again, the hopes for the technological side of the human–machine team are very high, as expressed by Cosenzo, Parasuraman, and de Visser (2010, p. 103): “The prevailing expectation in the robotics community is that autonomy will enable robots (air, ground, or sea) to function with little or no human intervention.” So far, these hopes are not being realized. To optimally support the human, the machine must at times take action without direct human control. However, this must be carefully managed in order to not disrupt the human’s situation awareness or increase the human’s mental workload. Considerable human involvement in controlling and monitoring UAV operations is expected to continue not only because of the technological challenges, but also because of the legal and moral issues associated with deploying weapons systems (see, for example, Bowden, 2013).

In the area of NextGen, wide-ranging changes are proposed and planned to prepare the US for the anticipated growing air travel demand through 2025. Sheridan (2009) outlined some of the significant changes in equipment and roles and responsibilities of pilots and ATC controllers that include the use of ADS-B technology (automatic dependent surveillance broadcast) that would provide more accurate latitude and longitude surveillance than radar; four-dimensional trajectories to be negotiated between airlines operations personnel, pilots, controllers and airport managers well before flight time; digital datalink as the major means of air–ground communication; and pilots assuming primary responsibility for self-separation while controllers assume more flow management responsibilities. As would be for any large-scale system changes, human errors and system failures will need to be anticipated not just for normal operations but also, and especially, for off-normal operations (Wickens, 2009; Wickens, Hooey, Gore, Sebok & Koenicke, 2009).

The next section presents a few parallel developments in psychology that either have a significant impact on aviation or that are at least partly a result of a need to address problems confronted in aviation.

The Aviation and Psychology Symbiosis

As noted above, the Wright Brothers’ success was due not only to their ingenuity in the mechanical engineering of aerodynamics but also to their recognition of the need for human control. Thus, developing or training piloting skill was an essential component of the Wright Brothers’ research program (for example, they made the analogy to learning to ride a horse or a bike). Orville Wright began training students in 1910 and established several training sites shortly after. The consequence of the lack of training was painfully clear when the US Army Air Corp was asked to take over the mail delivery service after an air mail scandal in 1934. In addition to their pilots having limited experience with winter flying, night-time flying, and instrument flying, most of the planes were poorly equipped. In 78 days of operation, 66 accidents resulted in 12 fatalities. Mail service was returned to the airline industry within a few short months. But training alone was not always sufficient. The disastrous results of training without selection during World War I revealed the need not just for selection for physical fitness but also selection for personality, emotional stability, and cognitive abilities (Armstrong, 1939; see Carretta & Ree, 2003 for a more current review).

The challenges of aviation that psychologists wrestled with during World War II further spurred the synthesis of aviation and psychology. The recognition that the then prevailing dominant psychological approach of behaviorism was ill-equipped to provide practical solutions to the many military problems led to the development of a number of new approaches to psychology.

For example, James Gibson, working in the US Army Air Force Aviation Psychology Program developed visual aptitude tests for screening pilot applicants. He also explored the possibility of increasing the effectiveness of training films in the 1940s (Gibson, 1947). Inspired in part by Langewiesche’s (1944) descriptions of how pilots use structure in optical flow fields to make judgments about approach and landing, Gibson rejected classical approaches to space perception to consider the possibility of “direct perception” for the control of locomotion. Many of these insights were first presented to psychology in the books The Perception of the Visual World in 1950 and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception in 1979. Gibson postulated that properties of objects and surfaces in the world are all perceived directly and are not inferred from sensations or mediated by cognitive processes.

Broadbent (1958) also recognized the need for more basic knowledge of how information is processed and developed a very different approach. He was instrumental in bringing the tools of communication science and information theory as a framework for quantifying human capacity (for example, bandwidth) in terms that were compatible with metrics used for characterizing the performance of automated systems (for example, bits/s). Building on computer and communication system metaphors, human cognition was modeled as a system of information processing stages.

One of the most widely known psychological facts is the magical number seven that refers to the limited amount of information one could hold in one’s short-term memory. More than half a century later, there is little to refute the hard limit of one’s short-term memory to a few chunks of information. But much underappreciated is the significance of the concept of chunking that George Miller discussed in his 1956 paper (Baddeley, 1994). As hard as the capacity limit of short-term memory is, the size of a chunk can be variable and is limited only by one’s knowledge base and strategy of forming meaningful units of information, enabling an effectively variable-capacity short-term memory. This was a significant departure from the behavioristic view of the dominance of environmental factors in determining behavior and fostered the idea that information processing does not necessarily begin and end in the environment. Today, efforts to study and model strategic processing abounds in areas such as signal detection (Sperandio, 1978); visual scanning (Bellenkes, Wickens & Kramer, 1977; van de Merwe, van Dijk & Zon, 2012), decision making (Schriver, Morrow, Wickens & Talleur, 2008), resource allocation (Iani & Wickens, 2007), management of mental workload (Adams, Tenny & Pew, 1995), and acquisition of expertise (for example, Adams & Ericsson, 1992).

The strategic and adaptive nature of human control did not escape those modeling the pilot–aircraft system. During the 1950s, the US Air Force sponsored a major effort to determine the transfer function (relating the pilot’s control stick output) to the error input (discrepancy in pitch, roll, or yaw relative to a given reference setting on the attitude indicator) in order to be better able to predict the overall system performance (Sheridan, 2010). McRuer and Jex (1967) discovered that whatever the controlled element dynamics the human operator would adapt and adjust his own transfer function in order to achieve low error and a high degree of system stability. The ability of pilots to adapt to substantial variations in flight dynamics is well characterized in the study of adaptive manual control (Kelley, 1968; Wickens, 2003; Young, 1969).

In addition to capturing the human adaptability, the optimal control model was developed to more explicitly take into account the overall system cons...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• PART I AVIATION PSYCHOLOGY
• PART II NEXT GENERATION AIR SPACE AND AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL
• PART III PILOT FACTORS FOR AIR AND GROUND-BASED OPERATIONS
• PART IV TRAINING AND SELECTION
• Index