ACERO- Advanced Capabilities for Emergency Response Operations Overview
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Firefighting↗
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The Naturalistic Flight Deck System: An Integrated System Concept for Improved Single-Pilot Operations
This paper reviews current and emerging operational experiences, technologies, and human-machine interaction theories to develop an integrated flight system concept designed to increase the safety, reliability, and performance of single-pilot operations in an increasingly accommodating but stringent national airspace system. This concept, know as the Naturalistic Flight Deck (NFD), uses a form of human-centered automation known as complementary-automation (or complemation) to structure the relationship between the human operator and the aircraft as independent, collaborative agents having complimentary capabilities. The human provides commonsense knowledge, general intelligence, and creative thinking, while the machine contributes specialized intelligence and control, extreme vigilance, resistance to fatigue, and encyclopedic memory. To support the development of the NFD, an initial Concept of Operations has been created and selected normal and non-normal scenarios are presented in this document.
Schutte, Paul C.↗
Flight Investigation using Variable-Stability Airplanes of Minimum Stability Requirements for High-Speed, High-Altitude Vehicles
The pilot opinion of the flying qualities of vehicles covering a wide range of longitudinal dynamic characteristics has been determined by the use of a variable-stability airplane. Particular emphasis has been placed on determining the minimum level of stability and control characteristics that the pilot can cope with. There was considerable pilot learning associated with operation in the regions of poor stability characteristics. In the statically stable region the maximum acceptable value of time to damp to half amplitude of the longitudinal mode for normal operation was about 1 second. For emergency conditions the damping could be reduced to zero over most of the frequency range. The extreme lim it of controllability corresponded to a time to double amplitude of the oscillation of about 1 - 1/2 seconds. In the statically unstable region somewhat shorter times to double amplitude were acceptable to the pilots. The boundary for emergency operation corresponded roughly to time to double amplitude of about 2/3 second and the limit of controllability of about l/3 second.
McFadden, Norman M.↗
Application of AI in the NAS - the Rationale for AI-Enhanced Airspace Management
This paper extends on the initial findings of "Application of Artificial Intelligence in the National Airspace System: A Primer" (Stroup & Niewoehner: Herndon, VA; ICNS-2019), and looks at why the current technologies, enterprise architecture, and future program plans may not be enough to address persistent operational challenges. This paper further explores why emergent operational concepts, business models, and demand profiles may necessitate AI-enhanced Communications, Navigation and Communications (CNS) infrastructure to disrupt current operational impediments. European airspace, as well as the NAS, has similar challenges. Key challenges explored in this study include: quantifiable improvements to NAS capacity, efficiency, and resiliency; traffic flow management of diverse users; UTM-ATM airspace integration; equitable access to airspace; and airborne-ground interoperability of AI applications. Finally, we examine why trustworthiness and resiliency will be key mileposts on the regulatory pathway to AI certification.
Aviation↗
Head-Worn Displays for NextGen
The operating concepts emerging under the Next Generation air transportation system (NextGen) require new technology and procedures - not only on the ground-side - but also on the flight deck. Flight deck display and decision support technologies are specifically targeted to overcome aircraft safety barriers that might otherwise constrain the full realization of NextGen. One such technology is the very lightweight, unobtrusive head-worn display (HWD). HWDs with an integrated head-tracking system are being researched as they offer significant potential benefit under emerging NextGen operational concepts. Two areas of benefit for NextGen are defined. First, the HWD may be designed to be equivalent to the Head-Up Display (HUD) using Virtual HUD concepts. As such, these operational credits may be provided to significantly more aircraft for which HUD installation is neither practical nor possible. Second, the HWD provides unique display capabilities, such as an unlimited field-of-regard. These capabilities may be integral to emerging NextGen operational concepts, eliminating safety issues which might otherwise constrain the full realization of NextGen. The paper details recent research results, current HWD technology limitations, and future technology development needed to realize HWDs as a enabling technology for NextGen.
Bailey, Randall E.↗
MSC Apollo 13 investigation team. Panel 3 - Flight operations and network, addendum 1 Final report
Analysis of Apollo 13 lunar module systems during emergency operation following command service module oxygen tank explosion
Source record↗
Simulated Versus Measured UHF Radiated Power at LaRC Street Level
The Airspace Operations and Safety Program, System-Wide Safety Project /Technical Challenge 2 – Emerging Operations at NASA Langley aims to increase the flight safety of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s) by informing UAV operators of regions of airspace where the radio frequency (RF) power at designated frequencies exceeds threshold values, indicating possible damage or interference with on-board systems. WinProp electromagnetic simulation software, a commercially available ray tracing program, has been implemented to predict radiated power from known RF sources. As a test case, the NextNav geolocation system, with nine transmitters operating at 926.227 MHz, was selected and modeled together with other existing structures at Langley. The radiated power at street level was calculated and compared with measurements taken at street level by a Signal Hound receiver and an Electro-Metrics antenna mounted on a van. The two sets of results generally agreed to within about 5 dB.
electromagnetic simulation↗
Satellite retrieval and servicing operations with proximity operations modules
The concept of manned and unmanned proximity modules (POM) to assist the Orbiter in retrieval, servicing, and emergency operations of orbiting payloads is discussed. An unmanned POM, capable of examining or capturing and returning to the Orbiter large satellites which are station-keeping at distances up to one kilometer from the Orbiter, is presented and its design features defined. Also presented is the concept of a manned POM which is capable of capturing and maneuvering smaller payloads in or about the Orbiter payload bay. The manned POM also serves as a free flying work station used to support satellite servicing and provide a back-up to Orbiter situations when the remote manipulator is inoperative.
Adornato, R. J.↗
On the neural substrates leading to the emergence of mental operational structures
A developmental approach to the study of the emergence of mental operational structures in neural networks is presented. Neural architectures proposed to underlie the six stages of the sensory-motor period are discussed.
Ogmen, H.↗
An Approach to Identifying Aspects of Positive Pilot Behavior within the Aviation Safety Reporting System
The National Airspace System (NAS) is constantly evolving as air traffic continues to ramp up to pre-pandemic numbers and projected to grow to unprecedented levels in the coming years. As well as increasing demand to the current system, emerging operations such as Unmanned Autonomous Systems are also expected to add to complexity in the airspace. To address these issues, the industry and government agencies supporting the NAS will need to rely upon additional automation and new technologies to address future operational requirements, while continuing to be a world-leading safe transportation system. As these new technologies are implemented, the system continues to rely on human pilots and controllers in the loop to monitor the system and intervene in situations the automation cannot handle. The goal of proactively addressing safety is of foremost concern to ensure passenger confidence. The industry has implemented various Safety Monitoring Systems to identify safety risks and proactively address them before they result in a serious incident or accident. One such program is the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). ASRS is a long-established system where pilots and controllers voluntarily and anonymously report safety incidents they experienced and observed during line operations by providing rich text narratives describing the events, the environment, and conditions leading to the safety event of concern. These narratives provide insight and context around events of interest and can be used to identify emerging problems. They can trigger investigations within Flight Operational Quality Assurance or Flight Data Monitoring programs. However, this process typically focuses on the adverse events and the unsafe aspects of the operations surrounding the reported or detected events. This perspective of investigating factors that went wrong around an adverse event is commonly referred to as Safety I. Alternatively, characterizing successful actions that operators perform every day under varying conditions that keep the system within safe operating bounds is a concept referred to as Safety II. The benefit of the Safety II view is that the scope is much larger than that of Safety I since a vast majority of the operations result in successful flights. Many of the successful techniques used to manage operational threats are not documented in standard operating procedures or taught during training. They are typically acquired over time by working with experienced pilots during line operations or in many cases after experiencing a problem for the first time and reacting to it in situ, drawing from years of experience to manage the threat. In an attempt to quantify these positive actions, we are proposing an approach to extracting key behaviors within ASRS reports that can support the Safety II concept. Our analysis assumes that ASRS reports contain some descriptions of corrective actions that operators performed to prevent a situation from leading to an accident. Leveraging recent advances in Natural Language Process modeling, we have developed an approach to extract positive sentiment from reports, embed these positive statements in a vector space where they can be numerically analyzed, and clustering these statements into similar contextual categories. From these contextualized categories we can attempt to summarized and distilled aspects of the positive behavior. The goal is to identify categories of behavior that describe consistent operator techniques that supports the Safety II concept. With this information, airlines may enable learning from these positive actions, or address procedures that need to be changed to avoid having pilots implement a workaround. These insights can provide a lens into what is “going right” in the operations that may otherwise not be known widely within the community. It is envisioned that this approach can be extended to other narrative programs such as Line Operation Safety Audit or Learning Improvement Team reports where similar observed behavior can be analyzed to extract positive actions and inform the overall operations.
NLP↗
An Approach to Identifying Aspects of Positive Pilot Behavior within the Aviation Safety Reporting System
The National Airspace System (NAS) is constantly evolving as air traffic continues to ramp up to pre-pandemic numbers and projected to grow to unprecedented levels in the coming years. As well as increasing demand to the current system, emerging operations such as Unmanned Autonomous Systems are also expected to add to complexity in the airspace. To address these issues, the industry and government agencies supporting the NAS will need to rely upon additional automation and new technologies to address future operational requirements, while continuing to be a world-leading safe transportation system. As these new technologies are implemented, the system continues to rely on human pilots and controllers in the loop to monitor the system and intervene in situations the automation cannot handle. The goal of proactively addressing safety is of foremost concern to ensure passenger confidence. The industry has implemented various Safety Monitoring Systems to identify safety risks and proactively address them before they result in a serious incident or accident. One such program is the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). ASRS is a long-established system where pilots and controllers voluntarily and anonymously report safety incidents they experienced and observed during line operations by providing rich text narratives describing the events, the environment, and conditions leading to the safety event of concern. These narratives provide insight and context around events of interest and can be used to identify emerging problems. They can trigger investigations within Flight Operational Quality Assurance or Flight Data Monitoring programs. However, this process typically focuses on the adverse events and the unsafe aspects of the operations surrounding the reported or detected events. This perspective of investigating factors that went wrong around an adverse event is commonly referred to as Safety I. Alternatively, characterizing successful actions that operators perform every day under varying conditions that keep the system within safe operating bounds is a concept referred to as Safety II. The benefit of the Safety II view is that the scope is much larger than that of Safety I since a vast majority of the operations result in successful flights. Many of the successful techniques used to manage operational threats are not documented in standard operating procedures or taught during training. They are typically acquired over time by working with experienced pilots during line operations or in many cases after experiencing a problem for the first time and reacting to it in situ, drawing from years of experience to manage the threat. In an attempt to quantify these positive actions, we are proposing an approach to extracting key behaviors within ASRS reports that can support the Safety II concept. Our analysis assumes that ASRS reports contain some descriptions of corrective actions that operators performed to prevent a situation from leading to an accident. Leveraging recent advances in Natural Language Process modeling, we have developed an approach to extract positive sentiment from reports, embed these positive statements in a vector space where they can be numerically analyzed, and clustering these statements into similar contextual categories. From these contextualized categories we can attempt to summarized and distilled aspects of the positive behavior. The goal is to identify categories of behavior that describe consistent operator techniques that supports the Safety II concept. With this information, airlines may enable learning from these positive actions, or address procedures that need to be changed to avoid having pilots implement a workaround. These insights can provide a lens into what is “going right” in the operations that may otherwise not be known widely within the community. It is envisioned that this approach can be extended to other narrative programs such as Line Operation Safety Audit or Learning Improvement Team reports where similar observed behavior can be analyzed to extract positive actions and inform the overall operations.
NLP↗
An Approach to Identifying Aspects of Positive Pilot Behavior within the Aviation Safety Reporting System
The National Airspace System (NAS) is constantly evolving as air traffic continues to ramp up to pre-pandemic numbers and projected to grow to unprecedented levels in the coming years. As well as increasing demand to the current system, emerging operations such as Unmanned Autonomous Systems are also expected to add to complexity in the airspace. To address these issues, the industry and government agencies supporting the NAS will need to rely upon additional automation and new technologies to address future operational requirements, while continuing to be a world-leading safe transportation system. As these new technologies are implemented, the system continues to rely on human pilots and controllers in the loop to monitor the system and intervene in situations the automation cannot handle. The goal of proactively addressing safety is of foremost concern to ensure passenger confidence. The industry has implemented various Safety Monitoring Systems to identify safety risks and proactively address them before they result in a serious incident or accident. One such program is the Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). ASRS is a long-established system where pilots and controllers voluntarily and anonymously report safety incidents they experienced and observed during line operations by providing rich text narratives describing the events, the environment, and conditions leading to the safety event of concern. These narratives provide insight and context around events of interest and can be used to identify emerging problems. They can trigger investigations within Flight Operational Quality Assurance or Flight Data Monitoring programs. However, this process typically focuses on the adverse events and the unsafe aspects of the operations surrounding the reported or detected events. This perspective of investigating factors that went wrong around an adverse event is commonly referred to as Safety I. Alternatively, characterizing successful actions that operators perform every day under varying conditions that keep the system within safe operating bounds is a concept referred to as Safety II. The benefit of the Safety II view is that the scope is much larger than that of Safety I since a vast majority of the operations result in successful flights. Many of the successful techniques used to manage operational threats are not documented in standard operating procedures or taught during training. They are typically acquired over time by working with experienced pilots during line operations or in many cases after experiencing a problem for the first time and reacting to it in situ, drawing from years of experience to manage the threat. In an attempt to quantify these positive actions, we are proposing an approach to extracting key behaviors within ASRS reports that can support the Safety II concept. Our analysis assumes that ASRS reports contain some descriptions of corrective actions that operators performed to prevent a situation from leading to an accident. Leveraging recent advances in Natural Language Process modeling, we have developed an approach to extract positive sentiment from reports, embed these positive statements in a vector space where they can be numerically analyzed, and clustering these statements into similar contextual categories. From these contextualized categories we can attempt to summarized and distilled aspects of the positive behavior. The goal is to identify categories of behavior that describe consistent operator techniques that supports the Safety II concept. With this information, airlines may enable learning from these positive actions, or address procedures that need to be changed to avoid having pilots implement a workaround. These insights can provide a lens into what is “going right” in the operations that may otherwise not be known widely within the community. It is envisioned that this approach can be extended to other narrative programs such as Line Operation Safety Audit or Learning Improvement Team reports where similar observed behavior can be analyzed to extract positive actions and inform the overall operations.
NLP↗
Airborne Trajectory Management for Urban Air Mobility
Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has captured the imagination of the public and the aviation industry for someday soon moving people and goods through and around metropolitan areas using Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) that are electrically powered, environmentally friendly, and autonomously operated. Significant investment and rapid development of vehicles for this activity is taking place, with package delivery services already beginning in some areas. However, the ability to manage thousands of these vehicles safely in a congested urban area presents a challenge unprecedented in air traffic management. Initial studies of this problem led by NASA under the UAS Traffic Management (UTM) initiative have primarily focused on geo-fencing and centralized reservation of airspace for individual flights. This paper proposes an extension of UTM using a de-centralized approach employing airborne surveillance, self-separation, and a minimized “design separation” approach to permit the optimization and safety of each flight in very high traffic densities and close proximities. The concept employs Airborne Trajectory Management (ABTM) principles and a novel new concept for variable separation criteria to manage the angular velocity of a passing vehicle, thus eliminating the "startle factor" and perceived hazard of very close operations. ABTM also accomplishes most of the services required for safe planning and execution of normal flights and recovery from abnormal or emergency operations while accommodating conventional piloted flights using the current air traffic control paradigm. The environment for UAM operations is described along with the proposed means for autonomous, tactical separation of the vehicles. Sample geometries of traffic conflicts and resolutions are shown and the airspace definitions, rules for flight within them, and additions and exemptions to the rules for these flights are listed and explained.
Cotton, William↗
Secure, Autonomous, Intelligent Controller for Integrating Distributed Emergency Response Satellite Operations
This report describes a Secure, Autonomous, and Intelligent Controller for Integrating Distributed Emergency Response Satellite Operations. It includes a description of current improvements to existing Virtual Mission Operations Center technology being used by US Department of Defense and originally developed under NASA funding. The report also highlights a technology demonstration performed in partnership with the United States Geological Service for Earth Resources Observation and Science using DigitalGlobe(Registered TradeMark) satellites to obtain space-based sensor data.
Ivancic, William D.↗
James Webb Space Telescope Ka-Band Trade
In August 2003 James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) had its Initial Review Confirmation Assessment Briefing with NASA HQ management. This is a major milestone as the project was approved to proceed from Phase A to B, and NASA will commit funds for the project towards meeting its science goals from the Earth-Sun s Lagrange 2 (L2) environment. At this briefing, the Project was asked, "to take another look" into using, the JPL s Deep Space Network (DSN) as the provider of ground stations and evaluate other ground station options. The current operations concept assumes S-band and X-band communications with a daily &hour contact using the DSN with the goal of transmitting over 250 Gigabit (Gb) of data to the ground. The Project has initiated a trade study to look at this activity, and we would like to share the result of the trade in the conference. Early concept trades tends to focus on the "normal" operation mode of supporting telemetry (science and engineering), command and radio metrics. Entering the design phase, we find that we have the unique ranging requirement for our L2 orbit using alternating ground stations located in different hemispheres. The trade must also address emergency operations (which are covered when using the DSN). This paper describes the issues confronting this Project and how the DSN and the JWST Project are working together to find an optimized approach for meeting these issues. We believe this trade is of major interest for future Code S and other L2 missions in that JWST will set the standard.
Gal-Edd, Jonathan↗
Constraint and Flight Rule Management for Space Mission Operations
The exploration of space is one of the most fascinating domains to study from a human factors perspective. Like other complex work domains such as aviation (Pritchett and Kim, 2008), air traffic management (Durso and Manning, 2008), health care (Morrow, North, and Wickens, 2006), homeland security (Cooke and Winner, 2008), and vehicle control (Lee, 2006), space exploration is a large-scale sociotechnical work domain characterized by complexity, dynamism, uncertainty, and risk in real-time operational contexts (Perrow, 1999; Woods et al, 1994). Nearly the entire gamut of human factors issues - for example, human-automation interaction (Sheridan and Parasuraman, 2006), telerobotics, display and control design (Smith, Bennett, and Stone, 2006), usability, anthropometry (Chaffin, 2008), biomechanics (Marras and Radwin, 2006), safety engineering, emergency operations, maintenance human factors, situation awareness (Tenney and Pew, 2006), crew resource management (Salas et al., 2006), methods for cognitive work analysis (Bisantz and Roth, 2008) and the like -- are applicable to astronauts, mission control, operational medicine, Space Shuttle manufacturing and assembly operations, and space suit designers as they are in other work domains (e.g., Bloomberg, 2003; Bos et al, 2006; Brooks and Ince, 1992; Casler and Cook, 1999; Jones, 1994; McCurdy et al, 2006; Neerincx et aI., 2006; Olofinboba and Dorneich, 2005; Patterson, Watts-Perotti and Woods, 1999; Patterson and Woods, 2001; Seagull et ai, 2007; Sierhuis, Clancey and Sims, 2002). The human exploration of space also has unique challenges of particular interest to human factors research and practice. This chapter provides an overview of those issues and reports on some of the latest research results as well as the latest challenges still facing the field.
Barreiro, J.↗
Human Factors in Space Exploration
The exploration of space is one of the most fascinating domains to study from a human factors perspective. Like other complex work domains such as aviation (Pritchett and Kim, 2008), air traffic management (Durso and Manning, 2008), health care (Morrow, North, and Wickens, 2006), homeland security (Cooke and Winner, 2008), and vehicle control (Lee, 2006), space exploration is a large-scale sociotechnical work domain characterized by complexity, dynamism, uncertainty, and risk in real-time operational contexts (Perrow, 1999; Woods et ai, 1994). Nearly the entire gamut of human factors issues - for example, human-automation interaction (Sheridan and Parasuraman, 2006), telerobotics, display and control design (Smith, Bennett, and Stone, 2006), usability, anthropometry (Chaffin, 2008), biomechanics (Marras and Radwin, 2006), safety engineering, emergency operations, maintenance human factors, situation awareness (Tenney and Pew, 2006), crew resource management (Salas et aI., 2006), methods for cognitive work analysis (Bisantz and Roth, 2008) and the like -- are applicable to astronauts, mission control, operational medicine, Space Shuttle manufacturing and assembly operations, and space suit designers as they are in other work domains (e.g., Bloomberg, 2003; Bos et al, 2006; Brooks and Ince, 1992; Casler and Cook, 1999; Jones, 1994; McCurdy et ai, 2006; Neerincx et aI., 2006; Olofinboba and Dorneich, 2005; Patterson, Watts-Perotti and Woods, 1999; Patterson and Woods, 2001; Seagull et ai, 2007; Sierhuis, Clancey and Sims, 2002). The human exploration of space also has unique challenges of particular interest to human factors research and practice. This chapter provides an overview of those issues and reports on sorne of the latest research results as well as the latest challenges still facing the field.
FROM↗
Project Echo: Standby Receiver System
The Echo I satellite receiving system at the Bell Telephone Laboratories facilities at Holmdel, New Jersey, required a 2390-Mc standby receiver system to maintain operation during possible failures of the primary maser receiver. This paper describes the details of the two matched parametric amplifiers that were used to provide the standby receiver. The use of this system in the initial Moonbounce experiments and in Project Echo is described. The details of an emergency operation at the beginning of a balloon pass are also presented.
Kibler, L. U.↗