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Feigh, Karen M.

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Impact of Adverse Weather on Commercial Helicopter Pilot Decision-Making and Standard Operating Procedures

2021-08 , Speirs, Andrew H. , Ramee, Coline , Payan, Alexia P. , Mavris, Dimitri N. , Feigh, Karen M.

Helicopter pilots face unique challenges with regard to adverse weather when compared to fixed-wing pilots. Rotorcraft typically operate at lower altitudes in off-field areas that are not always well covered by weather reporting stations. Although recent technological advances have increased the amount of weather data that pilots can access in the cockpit, weather remains a factor in 28% of fatal helicopter accidents. In this work, commercial helicopter pilots were surveyed and interviewed to better understand how they gather and process weather information, what the perceived limitations of current weather tools are, and how their decision-making process is affected by the information they gather and/or receive. Pilots were found to use a wide variety of weather sources for their initial go or no-go decision during the preflight phase, but use fewer weather sources in the cockpit while in-flight. Pilots highlighted the sparsity and sometimes inaccuracy of the weather information available to them in their prototypical operational domain. To compensate, they are forced to rely on local and experiential weather knowledge to supplement weather reports while still working to mitigate other external pressures. Based on the literature and on results from this work, recommendations are made to address the weather-related gaps faced by the rotorcraft community. This includes the installation of additional weather reporting stations outside of airports and densely populated areas, the further promotion of the HEMS tool to helicopter pilots in all industries, the development of weather tools capable of visualizing light precipitation such as fog, and the development of in-flight graphical displays that can help reduce the cognitive workload of interpreting weather information.

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Design of cognitive work support systems for airline operations

2008-08-20 , Feigh, Karen M.

The thesis begins by examining the evolution of human performance modeling from the initial stimulus-response methods introduced during the industrial revolution to model factory worker productivity, continues with a discussion of the information processing model where human cognition was modeled as a series of actions carried out in a predefined order, and ends with the concept of cognitive control whereby cognition is not considered a context-free mental process but modeled as an individual's ability to maintain control under varying contexts and to counter the effects of disturbances. The results from a preliminary evaluation conducted to determine if CCMs could be measured and if they provided any additional insight cognitive work are presented, and reveal that CCMs could be measured and the self-assessed CCM varied as predicted. A design process is developed which utilizes the CCMs as representing specific patterns of activity, thus specifying the design requirements. Following this design process, a prototype is created and evaluated using a controlled experiment to examine the effectiveness of the CWSS. The experiment examines performance, workload, and patterns of activity, and has several interesting findings. The first is that performance was independent of the almost all of the predictors and covariates including participant's Self-assessed CCM, with the exception of CCM transitions. As in the preliminary study, participants who reported transitioning between CCMs also reported decreased performance, increased frustration and actually performed worse. Second, perceived performance varied linearly with a participant's self-assessed CCM, but not with the actual performance. Third, participants report lower levels of effort when using a CWSS DM that matched their operational CCM. Finally, the design process successfully created a CWSS with DMs which support strategic and tactical CCMs. Unfortunately, no specific performance improvements were found for cases where the participant's CCM matched the DM as hypothesized, calling into question the effectiveness of creating different design modes for performance improvement. This thesis presents two methods for measuring CCMs: one direct single scale and one indirect composite scale. The measurements correlate highly. Both have a high degree of face validity and user acceptance. In the end, the composite measure may be a more robust measure of CCM because it provides a greater degree of diagnosticity by specifically inquiring after different aspects of CCM and is less susceptible to an individual's interpretation of the relative importance of the multiple dimensions of CCMs included in the definitions.

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Contextual Inquiry of a 100 Aircraft Regional Airline Systems Operation Center

2006-09 , Feigh, Karen M.

A contextual inquiry was conducted at the Systems Operational Center (SOC) of a Regional Airline with approximately 100 aircraft from the 24-27th of July 2006. A total of 30 hours of direct observation were conducted with various members of the SOC Staff including the Director of Systems Operations (DSO), the Manager of Customer Operations (MCO) and the Line Maintenance Planner (LMP). During the inquiry a wide variety of situations occurred: unscheduled maintenance delays, estimated ready time slips, a bird strike, a disruptive passenger requiring a cabin lock-down, a declared emergency due to oil temperature, taxi delays, weather delays, and brake-cooling delays. The vast majority of these situations were handled as if they were no different from routine operations; however, there were moments when the SOC personnel were pushed to their professional limits and the introduction of any other, even minor, issue could have caused severe disruptions to the schedule. The majority of problems faced by the the airline’s SOC on a daily basis came from lack of resources (planes and flight crew) and from inclement weather. During the inquiry, between 4-12 planes ( 6-9% of the fleet) were consistently out for unscheduled maintenance. Additionally, one one day during the observations 241 flight crew who were scheduled to fly were unavailable. Unlike other airlines, ATC restrictions are not often an issue for this airline, although station curfews in southern California do place an additional constraint on the schedule recovery process. Beyond the resource shortages and the inevitable weather interruptions, the majority of problems stemmed from software tools which limited the effectiveness of the SOC personnel. For example, several of the major software tools depend on different databases with limited connectivity, creating discrepancies between systems and requiring information to be entered multiple times. Additionally, the VisOps tool, used a primary measure of airline schedule adherence, does not support the logging of problems/issues, solution generation through the use of either advanced sort and search features, optimization algorithms and solution sharing. To make best use of the software tools on hand, especially VisOps, larger computer monitors are needed. The resolution at which the software tools must be set for visibility limits their usefulness with 19 inch monitors. Finally, none of the staff interviewed could indicate to any consistent quantitative feedback regarding the relative merits of their decisions on overall system performance. Instead, they often faced inquires about specific decisions which may only make sense when viewed from the overall context of the situation. Appropriate feedback could be provided as summary statistics regarding number of fights canceled, average delay and daily operational costs, which could be generated and displayed to them automatically.

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Development and Evaluation of an Automated Path Planning Aid

2012-11 , Watts, Robert , Christmann, Hans Claus , Johnson, Eric N. , Feigh, Karen M. , Tsiotras, Panagiotis

Handling en route emergencies in modern transport aircraft through adequate teamwork between the pilot, the crew and the aircraft’s automation systems is an ongoing and active field of research. An automated path planning aid tool can assist pilots with the tasks of selecting a convenient landing site and developing a safe path to land at this site in the event of an onboard emergency. This paper highlights the pilot evaluation results of a human factors study as part of such a proposed automated planning aid. Focusing on the interactions between the pilot and the automated planning aid, the presented results suggest that a particular implementation of the pilot aid interface, which uses a simple dial to sort the most promising landing sites, was effective. This selectable sorting capability, motivated by the anticipated cognitive mode of the pilot crew, improved the quality of the selected site for the majority of the cases tested. Although the presented approach increased the average time required for the selection of an alternate landing site, it decreased the time to complete the task in the case of emergencies unfamiliar to the pilot crew.

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Contextual Inquiry of a 50 Aircraft Regional Airline Systems Operation Center

2007-02 , Feigh, Karen M.

A contextual inquiry was conducted at the Systems Operations Control (SOC) of a regional airline with approximately 50 aircraft from the 8th-11th of November 2006. A total of 35 hours of direct observation were conducted with various members of the SOC Staff including the System Operations Control Shift Manager (SOCSM), the System Customer Service Manager (SCSM), the Dispatchers, and the Line Maintenance Planners (LMP). During the inquiry a wide variety of situations occurred: unscheduled maintenance delays, estimated ready time slips, a lightning strike, aircraft damage from a ground vehicle, a system-wide gate printer outage during a departure push, ATC delays, internet and subsequent ACARS outage, an unruly passenger disruption and turn back, and a sick dispatcher. The vast majority of these situations were handled as if they were no different from routine operations; however, there were moments when the SOC personnel were fully involved in the situation, and other minor tasks were being ignored or transferred to other personnel. The majority of high impact problems faced by the the airline’s SOC on a daily basis came from unscheduled maintenance or IT glitches. Unlike other airlines, ATC restrictions are not often an issue for this airline, although station curfews in southern California do place an additional constraint on the schedule recovery process. Similarly, weather was also only a minor issue during the contextual interview. Beyond the inevitable weather and maintenance interruptions, the majority of problems stemmed from software tools which limited the efficiency of the SOC personnel, and from procedures that required the SOCSM to do certain steps multiple times. For example, in order to keep the non-SOC personnel informed about the state of the airline, the SOCSM is required to run reports after each routing change and paste them into both email and the shift log. Additionally, the SOCSM is required to manually enter flight data to create new flights or to maintain existing ones. Similarly, the SOCSM is also required to manually enter and maintain maintenance segments for aircraft. The solution to these problems includes making better use of the current software’s functionality, investigating the actual information needs of the routing change recipient list, and incorporating additional automation to automatically create routing change reports and shift logs. The current software includes a capability to create new flights or maintenance segments using a correctly formatted text file. Using this capability would save much time in manual entry and minimize the number of typographical errors. Additional software should also be created to transition the incident reporting system and the shift log to an electronic database to facilitate data analysis. The SOCSM is currently responsible for posting any routing changes to a preset list via email. The actual information needs of these recipients should be reviewed to determine how frequently this information is actually required and whether or not a more scheduled reporting of all routing changes during a given time period might be adequate. Depending on the outcome, it might be possible to consolidate reports to once or twice a shift. Regardless, additional software should be created to automate the reporting process.

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Design of Support Systems for Airline Operations

2006-05 , Feigh, Karen M. , Pritchett, Amy R.

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Assessment of the accuracy of existing real-time wake vortex models

2011-03-31 , Sankar, Lakshmi N. , Schrage, Daniel P. , Feigh, Karen M. , Huff, Brian , Flick, Ashley , Manivannan, Vasu

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Contextual Inquiry of a Major US Airline Systems Operation Center

2007-01 , Feigh, Karen M.

A contextual inquiry was conducted at the airline’s Systems Operations Control (SOC) from the 13-15th of November 2006. A total of 26 hours of direct observation were conducted with various members of the SOC Staff including several of the Operations Coordinators, the ATC Coordinators, and the Operations Manager. During the inquiry a wide variety of situations occurred: unscheduled maintenance delays, estimated ready time slips, multiple hub ground delay programs, severely reduced arrival rates due to cross-directional winds, ground delay program revisions, and diversions of international flights. The vast majority of these situations were handled as if they were no different from routine operations; however, there were moments when the key SOC personnel were fully involved in the situation and the normal coordination and collaboration between the ATCCs, OCs, MOC and crew coordinators reverted to top down command and control. Thus the workload is not evenly distributed across all SOC personnel because of the geographic distribution of responsibilities. In addition to these observations this inquiry identified three issues with specific design implications, all centered around the OC’s work practices: overly involved coordination sessions with MOC, lack of control of printer output, and the use of schedule printouts as a primary source of solution information. All three of these issues lead to inefficiencies in the SOC operation, despite which, however, the SOC in general and the OCs in particular are able to remain effective. This report suggests that the OCs could become more efficient by shedding some of their printer maintenance tasks, extended MOC coordination sessions, and more effectively using software tools. In order to achieve this high level of effectiveness the SOC personnel actively adapt their roles and the balance of power depending on the level of operational disruption. With the addition of an MOC representative in the SOC or the availability of key maintenancerelated scheduling data, increased effectiveness may also be achievable under conditions of limited disruption. Changing the flow of messages from the printer to an on-screen system will help minimize the ‘busy’ work associated with maintaining the printer and keeping up with the printouts. Introducing new hardware and software tools to aid with the schedule sorting and filtering may also provide increased efficiency, especially for the more junior OCs.

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