Aviation Week & Space Technology - January 15, 2015

64 AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY/JANUARY 15-FEBRUARY 1, 2015 AviationWeek.com/awst

John Croft Mountain View, California

Long-Distance

Relationship

‘Super dispatcher’ fills in for a dozen

first ofcers in NASA studies

N

ASA is advancing an airliner

flight deck of the future that

features one seat in the cockpit

for a captain and one on the ground,

occupied by an operator filling the role

of either “super dispatcher” or first

ofcer. The research, while rife with

political and public ramifications that

could far outweigh the technical chal-

lenges, is far less science fiction than

it was three years ago.

At NASA’s Ames Research Center,

where researchers are unencumbered

by present day mores, a third major

study (SPO-3) since the research be-

gan in earnest in 2011 did not reveal

any showstoppers. The project gained

new momentum in May, when the cen-

ter awarded a one-year contract to an

industry team led by avionics and data

link provider Rockwell Collins to fur-

ther the concept.

Under the single-pilot understand-

ing for distributed simulations pro-

gram, the team will research the

crew capacity, ground and flight deck

resource management, physiological

monitoring technologies and automa-

tion needed to make SPO viable, in

addition to addressing technical, cer-

tification and policy issues that will

emerge. Rockwell Collins will also use

its live, virtual and constructive tech-

nologies to enable distributed simu-

lations of SPO, in which participants

will use a mix of simulators—and po-

tentially, in five years, live aircraft—in

dispersed geographic regions to test a

scenario. The company will also exper-

iment with its voice input and synthe-

sis technologies for the workstation.

The state of the art in SPO is a

product of nearly 20 years of founda-

tional research on distributed flight

deck operations work begun in the

mid-1990s with NASA’s advanced air

trafc management concepts for “Free

Flight,” a system that would allow air-

lines to choose their own flight paths.

Research was directed at “human-

centered, error-tolerant automation”

to enable decision-making between

pilots, controllers, and dispatchers for

gate-to-gate planning.

Although Free Flight in the early

2000s evolved into the FAA’s NextGen

program, ideas developed in that era on

how to better share workload between

the air and the ground directly contrib-

uted to NASA’s latest generation SPO

concept of operations (conops), which

30 commercial airline flight crews eval-

uated during a one-month simulation at

NASA Ames in July and August 2014.

In SPO-3, the conops revolved

around a specialized two-position

ground control station where the op-

erator when sitting in the right seat

fills the role of “super dispatcher” for

as many as 12 single-pilot airliners in

cruise flight. If one of the 12 aircraft

enters an “off-nominal” state due to

an issue or anomaly, the ground sta-

tion operator moves to the left seat

and becomes a ground-based first of-

ficer dedicated to that aircraft. NASA’s

Langley Research Center is focused on

the airborne solutions for SPO. NASA

decided to keep the ground station

separate from air trafc control. “We

conceived this as a way of supporting

operations from the airlines’ perspec-

tive,” says Walt Johnson, research psy-

chologist and lead for the flight deck

display research laboratory at NASA

Ames. “Everything that we are doing

is trying to keep this as transparent

and seamless to air trafc control as

possible. It’s a big challenge to try and

add or change air trafc control roles.”

Why 12 aircraft per super dispatch-

er? Johnson says researchers arrived at

that number by visiting airline opera-

tions centers and talking to dispatchers,

watching the number of aircraft they

handle on a daily basis. An important

part of the SPO-3 study was to find

out “whether we should start out with

pilots or whether we should start with

dispatchers (for the ground opera-

tor) and what are the required skills,”

says Vernol Battiste, a senior research

psychologist with San Jose State Uni-

versity working on the project. Pilots

in the previous study, SPO-2, made

their desires clear. “I need someone on

dedicated support that has been where

I’ve been, that can feel what I feel and

know what the issues are,” says Battiste

of the pilots’ input. “We decided to go

with pilots initially and train them to be

dispatchers.” Battiste says the amount

of dispatcher knowledge needed for the

study was “relatively modest.”

AIR TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT

NASA’s SPO ground station in-

cludes a super dispatcher position

on the right and a first ofcer posi-

tion on the left.

JOHN CROFT/AW&ST

Video See NASA researchers discuss the

latest evolution of single-pilot operations

conops—tap here in the digital edition or go to:

AviationWeek.com/NASASPO