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At least 541 records · Page 30

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NASA NTRS1986

Presentation of Class 1 designs for a family of commuter airplanes

The Class 1 configuration designs of a family of commuter aircraft are presented. The proposed aircraft will have a capacity of from 25 to 100 passengers. They are to have the following common features: (1) 2 aft fuselage mounted engines; (2) a low wing; (3) a T-tail type empennage; and (4) a tricycle type landing gear. A family concept is introduced to achieve structural, systems and handling quality commonality throughout. Implementing commonality can substantially reduce manufacturing and production costs. By achieving common system designs, maintenance costs can be reduced by permitting airlines to stock a smaller inventory of spares. Therefore, the higher degree of commonality, the lower the direct operating and life cycle costs. The attempt to implement some of the commonality requirements has caused configuration design problems, i.e., the twin-body concept was introduced. Design data are compared to existing aircraft, and the extent of structural, systems and handling qualities achieved are reviewed.

Creighton, Tom↗

NASA NTRS2005

Seeing is Believing: HUDs Are Now Commonplace on Airliners, and "Enhanced Vision" Could be Next

Head-up displays are gaining a prominent role on airline as well as business jet flight decks, as carriers exploit low-visibility guidance systems and corporate operators embrace "enhanced vision."

Hughes, David↗

NASA NTRS2006

Human Factors Considerations for Performance-Based Navigation

A transition toward a performance-based navigation system is currently underway in both the United States and around the world. Performance-based navigation incorporates Area Navigation (RNAV) and Required Navigation Performance (RNP) procedures that do not rely on the location of ground-based navigation aids. These procedures offer significant benefits to both operators and air traffic managers. Under sponsorship from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has undertaken a project to document human factors issues that have emerged during RNAV and RNP operations and propose areas for further consideration. Issues were found to include aspects of air traffic control and airline procedures, aircraft systems, and procedure design. Major findings suggest the need for human factors-specific instrument procedure design guidelines. Ongoing industry and government activities to address air-ground communication terminology, procedure design improvements, and chart-database commonality are strongly encouraged.

Barhydt, Richard↗

NASA NTRS1992

Annoyance caused by aircraft en route noise

A laboratory experiment was conducted to quantify the annoyance response of people on the ground to enroute noise generated by aircraft at cruise conditions. The en route noises were ground level recordings of eight advanced turboprop aircraft flyovers and six conventional turbofan flyovers. The eight advanced turboprop enroute noises represented the NASA Propfan Test Assessment aircraft operating at different combinations of altitude, aircraft Mach number, and propeller tip speed. The conventional turbofan en route noises represented six different commercial airliners. The overall durations of the en route noises varied from approximately 40 to 160 sec. In the experiment, 32 subjects judged the annoyance of the en route noises as well as recordings of the takeoff and landing noises of each of 5 conventional turboprop and 5 conventional turbofan aircraft. Each of the noises was presented at three sound pressure levels to the subjects in an anechoic listening room. Analysis of the judgments found small differences in annoyance between three combinations of aircraft type and operation. Current tone and corrections did not significantly improve en route annoyance prediction. The optimum duration-correction magnitude for en route noise was approximately 1 dB per doubling of effective duration.

Mccurdy, David A.↗

NASA NTRS1987

Introduction to Trans Australia Airlines CRM training

Trans Australia believes that its excellent accident rate record is due to a number of factors. It has a good group of standard operating procedures, and its crews are pretty well self-disciplined and adhere to those procedures. But the other thing that it believes is a factor in its safety record is that perhaps it is also due to its preparedness to be innovative, to keep up with what is going on in the rest of the world and, if it looks to have value, then to be amongst the first to try it out. Trans Australia commenced a program similar to Line Oriented Flight Training (LOFT) fairly early in 1979--that being its first windshear program-- which leads to why they are doing a course of resource management training, which we have chosen to call Aircrew Team Management (ATM). This course is detailed in another presentation.

Davidson, Jim↗

NASA NTRS1993

Weasel works SA-150: Design study of a 100 to 150 passenger transport aircraft

As the year 2000 rapidly approaches, the airlines are faced with an extremely competitive and environmentally restrictive marketplace. In order to survive, commercial air carriers will need to find new ways to lower their direct operating costs, increase load factors and comply with tightening federal and international constraints. The SA-150 has been designed to meet these demands by focusing on the areas of aerodynamic efficiency, an improved level of passenger comfort, and a limited application of advanced technology. The SA-150 has been optimized for a 500 nmi. mission to help the airlines meet the challenges of the short haul, quick turnaround flight. With a maximum capacity of 124 passengers, and full baggage, the SA-150 is also capable of covering a range of 1500 nmi. This additional range capability will provide the airlines with flexibility when scheduling their routes. The aircraft features a 'V' tail, fly-by-wire system and is powered by two turbofans mounted under a twelve aspect ratio wing. The SA-150 will have an initial production run of 800 units and have a purchase price of $37.7 million in 1993 dollars.

Alkema, Kevin↗

NASA NTRS1980

Application of Advanced Technologies to Small, Short-haul Air Transports

A study was conducted of the application of advanced technologies to small, short-haul transport aircraft. A three abreast, 30 passenger design for flights of approximately 100 nautical miles was evaluated. Higher wing loading, active flight control, and a gust alleviation system results in improved ride quality. Substantial savings in fuel and direct operating cost are forecast. An aircraft of this configuration also has significant benefits in forms of reliability and operability which should enable it to sell a total of 450 units through 1990, of which 80% are for airline use.

Adcock, C.↗

NASA NTRS2010

Use of Data Comm by Flight Crew in High-Density Terminal Areas

This paper describes a collaborative FAA and NASA experiment using 22 commercial airline pilots to determine the effect of using Datalink Communication (Data Comm) to issue messages in busy, terminal area operations. Four conditions were defined that span current day to future flight deck equipage levels (voice communication only, Data Comm only, Data Comm with Moving Map Display, Data Comm with Moving Map displaying taxi route), and each condition was used to create an arrival and a departure scenario at the Boston Logan Airport. These eight scenarios were repeated twice for a total of 16 scenarios for each of the eleven crews. Quantitative data was collected on subject reaction time and eye tracking information. Questionnaires collected subjective feedback on workload and acceptability to the flight crew for using Data Comm in a busy terminal area. 95% of the Data Comm messages were responded to by the flight crew within one minute; however, post experiment debrief comments revealed almost unanimous consensus that two minutes was a reasonable expectation for crew response. Eye tracking data indicated an insignificant decrease in head-up time for the Pilot Flying when Data Comm was introduced; however, the Pilot Monitoring had significantly less head-up time. Data Comm workload was rated as operationally acceptable by both crew members in all conditions in flight at any altitude above the Final Approach Fix in terms of response time and workload. Results also indicate the use of Data Comm during surface operations was acceptable, the exception being the simultaneous use of voice, Data Comm, and audio chime required for an aircraft to cross an active runway. Many crews reported they believed Data Comm messages would be acceptable after the Final Approach Fix or to cross a runway if the message was not accompanied by a chime and there was not a requirement to immediately respond to the uplink message.

Baxley, Brian T.↗

NASA NTRS2018

Overview of NASA's Air Traffic Management - eXploration (ATM-X) Project

Projected increases in new vehicle types, new missions, and the continual growth in traditional (e.g., airlines, general aviation) aviation will require changes to the current air traffic system, particularly to accommodate the desire of operators to be more involved in air traffic decisions. To address these challenges, the National Airspace System needs to undergo a transformation to a more scalable, flexible, user-focused system that addresses safety and security requirements and resiliency for current and new users. A system designed to integrate modular software services, provided by users, third parties and government for air traffic management functions, will be scalable and more easily allow modernization and for collaboration between users and service providers. ATM-X is responding to NASA's pivot towards integrating projected new, diverse entrants into the NAS, while also leveraging NASA's prior ATM achievements that continue to improve traditional airspace operations. This project is a two-phased approach to conduct research and focused evaluations to assess the feasibility of a service-based approach and to identify critical design considerations to enable airspace access for new entrants, integrated with current traditional operations. Phase 1 research will be conducted to determine what is needed to reach the ATM-X goals based on specific use-cases to enable large-scale, passenger-carrying Urban Air Mobility operations in a metroplex environment, and also to improve traditional operations in the Northeast Region leveraging mature NASA technologies. Some of these evaluations will be conducted in simulations and field activities. Phase 2 will build upon Phase 1 towards more defined, focused research and field demonstrations in real-world environments to integrate multiple elements of a scalable, service-based ATM-X concept.

air traffic management↗

NASA NTRS2019

Deep Learning Method for Detecting Precursors to Adverse Events

With the recent advancements in Deep Learning methods, the ability to model large complex heterogeneous data sets are fundamentally changing industry and research. Coupled with hardware improvements, and ease of implementation, a wide variety of deep neural network architectures can quickly be developed to solve a sweeping range of problems such as: object detection in images, automatic healthcare diagnosis using heterogenous data sources, real time language translating and sentence prediction, upscaling low resolution images, and forecasting of multivariate timeseries. Generally, many of these architectures outperform classical machine learning approaches in their respective tasks, however, this typically comes at a cost of interpretability. These black box algorithms generally suffer from lack of transparency in both model complexity as well as the rationale behind the prediction. This lack of comprehension, is driving an emerging area of interest in “Explainable AI”. An algorithm called: “Deep Temporal Multiple Instance Learning”1 was a recently developed to identify precursors to adverse events and has been applied in the aviation domain. The deep learning architecture is designed to capture the evolution of the probability of the outcome over the time preceding the adverse event using a multiple instance learning approach as illustrated in Figure 1. Precursors are defined when the probability of the event has exceeded a threshold at some point in the timeseries, at which point, a sensitivity analysis is performed to determine contributing factors. The contributing factors are used to explain and define the precursor during the periods where the probability score is high. The identified contributing factors are then presented to subject matter experts to provide objective insights into the leading factors associated with the particular adverse event. The algorithm has been tested on flight data from a commercial airline and has the ability to discover precursors to known adverse events that take the form of safety critical operations, such as unstable approach events on final approach. Apart from detecting precursors to adverse events, the converse can also be leveraged to discover corrective actions. These positive actions manifest themselves as periods in the timeseries when the precursor score has been lowered from an elevated state; meaning that if the system had been left uncorrected, it would have eventually reached the adverse event state. Characterizing these state changes can help identify successful interventions that may not have been known before. Policy makers and procedure designers can use this additional knowledge to craft more safety and efficient resilient procedures for future operations and therefore improve the overall performance of the National Airspace.

Matthews, Bryan L.↗

NASA NTRS2016

Measuring and Modeling Shared Visual Attention

Multi-person teams are sometimes responsible for critical tasks, such as flying an airliner. Here we present a method using gaze tracking data to assess shared visual attention, a term we use to describe the situation where team members are attending to a common set of elements in the environment. Gaze data are quantized with respect to a set of N areas of interest (AOIs); these are then used to construct a time series of N dimensional vectors, with each vector component representing one of the AOIs, all set to 0 except for the component corresponding to the currently fixated AOI, which is set to 1. The resulting sequence of vectors can be averaged in time, with the result that each vector component represents the proportion of time that the corresponding AOI was fixated within the given time interval. We present two methods for comparing sequences of this sort, one based on computing the time-varying correlation of the averaged vectors, and another based on a chi-square test testing the hypothesis that the observed gaze proportions are drawn from identical probability distributions.We have evaluated the method using synthetic data sets, in which the behavior was modeled as a series of activities, each of which was modeled as a first-order Markov process. By tabulating distributions for pairs of identical and disparate activities, we are able to perform a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, allowing us to choose appropriate criteria and estimate error rates.We have applied the methods to data from airline crews, collected in a high-fidelity flight simulator (Haslbeck, Gontar Schubert, 2014). We conclude by considering the problem of automatic (blind) discovery of activities, using methods developed for text analysis.

attention↗

NASA NTRS1985

Planning fuel-conservative descents in an airline environmental using a small programmable calculator: Algorithm development and flight test results

A simple, airborne, flight-management descent algorithm was developed and programmed into a small programmable calculator. The algorithm may be operated in either a time mode or speed mode. The time mode was designed to aid the pilot in planning and executing a fuel-conservative descent to arrive at a metering fix at a time designated by the air traffic control system. The speed model was designed for planning fuel-conservative descents when time is not a consideration. The descent path for both modes was calculated for a constant with considerations given for the descent Mach/airspeed schedule, gross weight, wind, wind gradient, and nonstandard temperature effects. Flight tests, using the algorithm on the programmable calculator, showed that the open-loop guidance could be useful to airline flight crews for planning and executing fuel-conservative descents.

Knox, C. E.↗

NASA NTRS1987

The application of CRM to military operations

The detailed content of the CRM training component of the C-5 Aircrew Training System (ATS) was left to the discretion of the contractor. As a part of determining what the content should be, United Airlines Services Corporation has made an effort to understand how the needs of MAC crews compare with those of civilian airline crews. There are distinct similarities between the crew roles in the cockpits of civilian airliners and military air transports. Many of the attitudes and behaviors exhibited by civil and military crew members are comparable, hence much of the training in the field referred to as Cockpit Resource Management (CRM) is equally appropriate to civil or military aircrews. At the same time, there are significant differences which require assessment to determine if modifications to what might be termed generic CRM are necessary. The investigation enabled the definition and specification of CRM training which is believed to address the needs of the C-5 operational community. The study has concentrated largely on military airlift, but the training objectives and course content of the CRM training are readily adaptable to a wider range of military cockpits than are found in strategic airlift. For instance, CRM training focusing on communication, leadership, situational awareness, and crew coordination is just as appropriate, with some modification, to the pilots manning a flight to Tactical Airlift Command A-7's as it is to the pilots, flight engineers, and loadmasters crewing a C-5.

Cavanagh, Dale E.↗

NASA NTRS2005

UWB EMI To Aircraft Radios: Field Evaluation on Operational Commercial Transport Airplanes

Ultrawideband (UWB) transmitters may soon be integrated into a wide variety of portable electronic devices (PEDs) that passengers routinely carry on board commercial airplanes. Airlines and the FAA will have difficulty controlling passenger use of UWB transmitters during flights with current airline policies and existing wireless product standards. The aeronautical community is concerned as to whether evolving FCC UWB rules are adequate to protect legacy and emerging aeronautical radio systems from electromagnetic interference (EMI) from emerging UWB products. To address these concerns, the NASA Office of Space Communications and Chief Spectrum Managers assembled a multidisciplinary team from NASA LaRC, NASA JPL, NASA ARC, FAA, United Airlines, Sky West Airlines, and Eagles Wings Inc. to carry out a comprehensive series of tests aimed at determining the nature and extent of any EMI to aeronautical communication and navigation systems from UWB devices meeting FCCapproved and proposed levels for unlicensed handheld transmitters.

Oria, A. J.↗

NASA NTRS2019

Field Evaluation of the Baseline Integrated Arrival, Departure, and Surface Capabilities at Charlotte Douglas International Airport

NASA is currently developing a suite of decision support capabilities for integrated arrival, departure, and surface (IADS) operations in a metroplex environment. The effort is being made in three phases, under NASA's Airspace Technology Demonstration 2 (ATD-2) sub-project, through a strong partnership with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), air carriers, airport, and general aviation community. The Phase 1 Baseline IADS capabilities provide enhanced operational efficiency and predictability of flight operations through data exchange and integration, tactical surface metering, and automated coordination of release time of controlled flights for overhead stream insertion. The users of the IADS system include the personnel at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT) air traffic control tower, American Airlines ramp tower, CLT terminal radar approach control (TRACON), and Washington Center. This paper describes the Phase 1 Baseline IADS capabilities and field evaluation conducted at CLT from September 2017 for a year. From the analysis of operations data, it is estimated that 538,915 kilograms of fuel savings, and 1,659 metric tons of CO2 emission reduction were achieved during the period with a total of 944 hours of engine run time reduction. The amount of CO2 savings is estimated as equivalent to planting 42,560 urban trees. The results have also shown that the surface metering had no negative impact on on-time arrival performance of both outbound and inbound flights. The technology transfer of Phase 1 Baseline IADS capabilities has been made to the FAA and aviation industry, and the development of additional capabilities for the subsequent phases is underway.

Jung, Yoon C.↗

NASA NTRS2019

Field Evaluation of the Baseline Integrated Arrival, Departure, and Surface (IADS) Capabilities at Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT)

and Surface (IADS)↗

NASA NTRS2010

Meeting Air Transportation Demand in 2025 by Using Larger Aircraft and Alternative Routing to Complement NextGen Operational Improvements

A study was performed that investigates the use of larger aircraft and alternative routing to complement the capacity benefits expected from the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) in 2025. National Airspace System (NAS) delays for the 2025 demand projected by the Transportation Systems Analysis Models (TSAM) were assessed using NASA s Airspace Concept Evaluation System (ACES). The shift in demand from commercial airline to automobile and from one airline route to another was investigated by adding the route delays determined from the ACES simulation to the travel times used in the TSAM and re-generating new flight scenarios. The ACES simulation results from this study determined that NextGen Operational Improvements alone do not provide sufficient airport capacity to meet the projected demand for passenger air travel in 2025 without significant system delays. Using larger aircraft with more seats on high-demand routes and introducing new direct routes, where demand warrants, significantly reduces delays, complementing NextGen improvements. Another significant finding of this study is that the adaptive behavior of passengers to avoid congested airline-routes is an important factor when projecting demand for transportation systems. Passengers will choose an alternative mode of transportation or alternative airline routes to avoid congested routes, thereby reducing delays to acceptable levels for the 2025 scenario; the penalty being that alternative routes and the option to drive increases overall trip time by 0.4% and may be less convenient than the first-choice route.

Smith, Jeremy C.↗

NASA NTRS1991

Flight tests with a data link used for air traffic control information exchange

Previous studies showed that air traffic control (ATC) message exchange with a data link offers the potential benefits of increased airspace system safety and efficiency. To accomplish these benefits, data link can be used to reduce communication errors and relieve overloaded ATC voice radio frequencies, which hamper efficient message exchange during peak traffic periods. Flight tests with commercial airline pilots as test subjects were conducted in the NASA Transport Systems Research Vehicle Boeing 737 airplane to contrast flight operations that used current voice communications with flight operations that used data link to transmit both strategic and tactical ATC clearances during a typical commercial airflight from takeoff to landing. The results of these tests that used data link as the primary communication source with ATC showed flight crew acceptance, a perceived reduction in crew work load, and a reduction in crew communication errors.

Knox, Charles E.↗