The Federal Aviation Administration Air Traffic Organization (ATO) is responsible for ensuring safety and efficiency of air traffic operations while maintaining and updating its air traffic control automation systems and communication, navigation, and surveillance assets. To achieve this, the ATO uses safety management system (SMS) policies and procedures to collect operational data from multiple sources and apply various data analytics techniques for safety risk management and safety assurance. Integrating new aircraft into increasingly complex airspace led to the National Academies identifying the need for SMS to evolve and recommend the development of an In-time Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS). The IASMS will provide a framework to safely bridge legacy air traffic operations with the integration of new entrants to ensure a safe future National Airspace System.

The National Airspace System (NAS) is growing in complexity of aircraft, missions, and operations. In response, many organizations have published papers and concepts of operations (ConOps) for new and enhanced safety systems. The National Academies' vision for an Intime Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS) is integral to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) modernization efforts. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) System-Wide Safety (SWS) project is conducting safety research, exploring solutions, and defining the safety needs of future missions, such as Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) and autonomous aircraft operating in a more connected, flexible, and dynamic airspace. IASMS enables and provides a path for bringing FAA's operational vision to fruition through increasingly automated safety systems that integrate services, functions, and capabilities (SFCs). These SFCs provide the necessary responsiveness to monitor, assess, and mitigate known hazards and emergent risks. This paper describes how safety in today's air transportation system will need to evolve, identifies key points regarding in-time safety, and explores the criticality of IASMS in the future NAS.

In-time integrated safety management will be paramount for safely enabling the envisioned transformations of the future National Airspace System (NAS). The path for realizing the vision includes addressing the increasing need for advanced data analytics and fusion of aviation safety data, managed by human decision-makers. The paper describes safety management systems and its’ challenges, and how the concept of In-time Aviation Safety Management Systems addresses the need to ensure an adaptable and resilient future safety system in the envisioned transformed NAS. Finally, it discusses potential human factors challenges, including new human roles and responsibilities, new information and cognitive requirements, new intelligent technologies that change human-system interaction and coordination, and new design paradigms for human-system integration and teaming.

The National Airspace System is foreseen to undergo revolutionary change with Urban Air Mobility (UAM) and its use of vertiports to transport passengers and cargo. To assure safety with UAM and more broadly with Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), the National Academies recommended an In-time Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS) that is extensible to the design and operation of vertiports. Vertiport designs will scale in several dimensions including physical size and infrastructure depending upon location and in the Services, Functions, and Capabilities required for assuring safety with increasingly complex vertiport designs and operations. These operations will be enabled by evolving technologies including electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for passenger- and cargo-carrying commercial transportation. Within this construct, safety hazards and risk mitigations involving predictive data analytics and modeling will be used. Use cases and future challenges are examined to guide maturation of the IASMS ConOps for vertiports.

The National Airspace System undergoes continuous change including in the Upper Class E airspace involving increasingly complex operations and a widening diversity of vehicles. To secure a safe future system, the National Academies recommended an In-time Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS) that is extensible to Upper E. Current Air Traffic Management is not cost-effective to scale for future Upper E operations and diversity of vehicles so the Federal Aviation Administration developed an Upper E Traffic Management ConOps to safely integrate the diverse operations and vehicles having different performance characteristics and flight missions without disrupting current operations including space launch and reentry, suborbital flights, supersonic and hypersonic flights, slow moving or stationary unmanned balloons, and long endurance fixed wing vehicles that are slow, stationary, or high speed. IASMS integrates state-of-the-art predictive modeling with reactive and proactive analytics to detect hazards and mitigate risk precursors for Upper E operators. IASMS identifies emergent safety risks exposed by transformation of the NAS with new and increasingly complex operations. Safety intelligence will also expand the data available and offer insight to new approaches for implementing safety improvements to mitigate risk with more seamless “in-time” integration across the policy, risk management, safety assurance, and promotion pillars of SMS.

The envisioned transformation of the National Airspace System to integrate an In-time Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS) to assure safety in Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) brings unprecedented challenges to the design of human interfaces and management of safety information. Safety in design and operational safety assurance are critical factors for how humans will interact with increasingly autonomous systems. The IASMS Concept of Operations builds from traditional commercial operator safety management and scales in complexity to AAM. The transformative changes in future aviation systems pose potential new critical safety risks with novel types of aircraft and other vehicles having different performance capabilities, flying in increasingly complex airspace, and using adaptive contingencies to manage normal and non-normal operations. These changes compel development of new and emerging capabilities that enable innovative ways for humans to interact with data and manage information. Increasing complexity of AAM corresponds with use of predictive modeling, data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to effectively address known hazards and emergent risks. The roles of humans will dynamically evolve in increments with this technological and operational evolution. The interfaces for how humans will interact with increasingly complex and assured systems designed to operate autonomously and how information will need to be presented are important challenges to be resolved.

Transformations of the National Airspace System, such as envisioned with Advanced Air Mobility, will enable improvements for managing and assuring safety for Part 135 transportation of passengers and cargo. The purpose of this paper is to describe the In-time Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS) Concept of Operations (ConOps) and how its innovations such as using predictive analytics could benefit operators for risk management and safety assurance. The National Academies recommended development of an IASMS ConOps to secure a safe future NAS. Part 135 operators are currently not required to have a formal safety management system.

Today’s commercial air carriers ensure safety through use of Safety Management Systems (SMS) although traditional SMS is labor-intensive and has difficulty scaling with the increasing complexity of operational data. An In-time Aviation Safety Management System envisions the integration of risk management and safety assurance using machine learning to timely monitor, assess, and mitigate known risks and detect emergent risks. This innovative perspective enables proactive and predictive safety using data analytics for improved actionable safety intelligence and risk visualization.

The National Academies provided a vision for transformation of the future airspace system for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) which is an In-time Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS). The IASMS integrates safety assurance, which is the foundation for In-time System-wide Safety Assurance (ISSA), with traditional risk management. The IASMS and its distributed architecture scales in relation to innovations in the Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) and an increasingly complex AAM ecosystem comprised of an expanding mix of small UAS, air taxis, traditional operations, new supersonic aircraft, and space launch systems. Design of an IASMS builds on the In-Time System-wide Safety Assurance (ISSA) concept that mitigates risks before they can lead to an incident or accident using an architecture that integrates shared operational and IASMS-unique Services, Functions, and Capabilities (SFCs). The design of the IASMS architecture couples SFCs in both traditional and innovative ways to more effectively identify patterns in precursors, anomalies and trends and validate known-knowns, manage unknown-knowns, analyze known-unknowns, and discover unknown-unknowns that pose risk to AAM solutions.

NASA’s vision for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) Mission is to help emerging aviation markets to safely develop an air transportation system that moves people and cargo between places previously not served or underserved by aviation. The integration of new operational paradigms and vehicle classes in this system requires a transformation of the National Airspace System (NAS) that includes substantive changes critical for assuring safety. These changes are compelled by unique challenges posed by AAM to the safety management system (SMS). These challenges were assessed by committees of the National Academies in their reports on a vision for an In-time Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS) and a blueprint for AAM [1, 2]. In their description of an IASMS, the top recommendation was development of a concept of operations (ConOps) for IASMS. This paper describes the high-priority recommendations from the National Academies for its IASMS vision and how they are addressed through a distributed system-of-systems architecture. The IASMS architecture is structured on the services, functions, and capabilities (SFCs) necessary for In-time System-wide Safety Assurance (ISSA) initially developed for urban air mobility (UAM). The paper then posits where these SFCs would reside across vehicles, airspace, or service suppliers such as Supplemental Data Service Providers (SDSPs), and how SFCs scale with increasing complexity in design and operations of AAM. SFCs are foundational building blocks for a system that targets an individual or family of risks using a Monitor-Assess-Mitigate risk paradigm for anomalies, precursors and trends. An IASMS could be conceived that uses a portfolio of SFCs for AAM in general or prioritizes SFCs for a specific domain or operation.

The emergence of commercial space operations (CSO) is one of many Advanced Air Mobility domains that pose major challenges to in-time safety assurance because of the different architectures used by the operators and other agents. The National Academies recognized the need to improve integration of disparate architectures and recommended that an In-time Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS) be developed to provide seamless connectivity across interacting architectures and enable in-time safety assurance. An ontological approach to integrating CSO with IASMS involves in-time Services, Functions, and Capabilities design to manage operational risks and inform changes to design. The resulting integrated architecture provides a common basis for risk management and in-time safety assurance.

Assuring safety in the NAS with the inclusion of new entrants that are part of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) will require overcoming unique safety challenges that result from combining innovative technologies with novel airspace concepts for moving people and cargo using semi-autonomous/autonomous vehicles. Overcoming these AAM safety assurance challenges is the focus of the In-time Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS). The IASMS Concept of Operations (ConOps) describes an interconnected set of services, functions, and capabilities (SFCs) designed to manage operational risks, identify unknown risks, and inform system design to mitigate risk. This paper describes a broad approach for identifying SFCs involving technology trends in research, assessment of known and unknown risks in safety reports, and causal and contributing factors in aviation accidents and incidents. This approach leverages these sources to identify potential SFCs that enable the Monitor, Assess, and Mitigate (M-A-M) functionality that represents the enabling framework of the IASMS.

A Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST) study of 18 LOC-I accidents determined that a lack of external visual references (i.e., darkness, instrument meteorological conditions, or both) was associated with a flight crew's loss of attitude awareness or energy state awareness in 17 of these events. In response, CAST called for research on Virtual Day-Visual Meteorological Condition (VMC) displays, also known as Synthetic Vision Systems, to accomplish the intended function of improving flight crew awareness of airplane attitude. A NASA high-fidelity simulator research study is described that focused on evaluation of the technology during upset recovery and line operational simulation scenarios with Boeing 787-rated international airline flight crews, which supplements previous studies evaluating the technology with U.S. domestic air transport pilots. The results evinced that synthetic vision systems can significantly enhance recognition of, and prevention of entry into unusual attitudes and aid in recovery especially over high-terrain environments through substantially enhanced attitude and terrain awareness.

A Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST) study of 18 loss-of-control events determined that a lack of external visual references was a contributing factor in 17 of these events. CAST recommended that manufacturers should develop and implement virtual day-VMC display systems, such as synthetic vision (SV) or equivalent systems (CAST Safety Enhancement, SE-200). In support of this recommended action, CAST has requested studies to define minimum requirements for virtual day-visual meteorological conditions (VMC) displays to improve flight crew awareness of airplane attitude. NASA's research in Virtual day-VMC displays, known as synthetic vision systems, are intended to support intuitive flight crew attitude awareness similar to a day-VMC-like environment, especially if they could be designed to create visual dominance. A study was conducted to evaluate the utility of ambient vision (AV) cues paired with virtual Head-Up Display (HUD) symbology on a prototype head- worn display (HWD) during recovery from unusual attitudes in a simulated environment. The virtual-HUD component meets the requirement that the HWD may be used as an equivalent display to the HUD. The presence of AV cueing leverages the potential that a HWD has over the HUD for spatial disorientation prevention. The simulation study was conducted as a single-pilot operation, under realistic flight scenarios, with off-nominal events occurring that were capable of inducing unusual attitudes. Independent variables of the experiment included: 1) AV capability (on vs off) 2) AV display opaqueness (transparent vs opaque) and display location (HWD vs traditional headdown displays); AV cues were only present when the HWD was being worn by the subject pilot.

Recent accident and incident data suggest that Spatial Disorientation (SD) and Loss-of-Energy State Awareness (LESA) for transport category aircraft are becoming an increasingly prevalent safety concern in domestic and international operations. A CAST study of 18 loss-of-control accidents determined that a lack of external visual references (i.e., darkness, instrument meteorological conditions, or both) was associated with a flight crew’s loss of attitude awareness or energy state awareness in 17 of these events. In response, CAST requested that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) conduct research to support definition of minimum requirements for Virtual Day-Visual Meteorological Condition (VMC) displays, also known as Synthetic Vision Systems, to accomplish the intended function of improving flight crew awareness of airplane attitude. These research data directly inform the development of minimum aviation system performance standards (MASPS) for RTCA special committee (SC)-213, “Enhanced Flight Vision Systems and Synthetic Vision Systems.” An overview of NASA high-fidelity simulator research is provided that collected data specific to CAST and RTCA needs on the efficacy of synthetic vision technology to aid in attitude awareness and prevent entry into, and recovery from unusual attitudes. The paper highlights our research with low-hour, international flight crews.

Research, development, test, and evaluation of flight deck interface technologies is being conducted by NASA to proactively identify, develop, and mature tools, methods, and technologies for improving aviation safety of new and legacy vehicles operating in the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). One specific area of research was the use of small head-worn displays (HWDs) to serve as a possible equivalent to a head-up display (HUD) for commercial aircraft. A simulation experiment was conducted to evaluate if the HWD can provide an equivalent level of performance to a HUD. Airline flight crews conducted simulated approach and landing operations during low visibility operations. The results showed that there were no statistical differences in flight crews' performance in terms of flight technical error suggesting that the HWD may serve as an equivalent display to the HUD. Further, the HWD may have several advantages over a HUD making its adoption an attractive alternative for commercial flight deck implementation. Technical hurdles remain to be overcome for complete display equivalence including, most notably, the end-to-end latency of the HWD system. The results and conclusions taken from the results of the high fidelity simulation experiment are described and offer future research directions. (C) 2018 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).

Abstract. NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) has conducted research in the area of helmet-mounted display (HMD)/head-worn display (HWD) over the past 30 years. Initially, NASA LaRC’s research focused on military applications, but recently NASA has conducted a line of research in the area of HWD for commercial and business aircraft. This work revolved around numerous simulation experiments as well as flight tests to develop technology and data for industry and regulatory guidance. This paper summarizes the results of NASA’s HMD/HWD research. Of note, the work tracks progress in wearable collimated optics, head tracking, latency reduction, and weight. The research lends credence to a small, sunglasses-type form factor of the HWD being acceptable to commercial pilots, and this goal is now becoming technologically feasible. The research further suggests that an HWD may serve as an “equivalent” head-up display (HUD) with safety, operational, and cost benefits. “HUD equivalence” appears to be the economic avenue by which HWDs can become mainstream on the commercial and business aircraft flight deck. If this happens, NASA’s research suggests that additional operational benefits using the unique capabilities of the HWD can open up new operational paradigms.

Head-Worn Displays (HWDs) are envisioned as a possible equivalent to a Head-Up Display (HUD) in commercial and general aviation. A simulation experiment was conducted to evaluate whether the HWD can provide an equivalent or better level of performance to a HUD in terms of unusual attitude recognition and recovery. A prototype HWD was tested with ambient vision capability which were varied (on/off) as an independent variable in the experiment testing for attitude awareness. The simulation experiment was conducted in two parts: 1) short unusual attitude recovery scenarios where the aircraft is placed in an unusual attitude and a single-pilot crew recovered the aircraft; and, 2) a two-pilot crew operating in a realistic flight environment with off-nominal events to induce unusual attitudes. The data showed few differences in unusual attitude recognition and recovery performance between the tested head-down, head-up, and head-worn display concepts. The presence and absence of ambient vision stimulation was inconclusive. The ergonomic influences of the head-worn display, necessary to implement the ambient vision experimentation, may have influenced the pilot ratings and acceptance of the concepts.

NASA Langley has conducted research in the area of helmet-mounted/head-worn displays over the past 30 years. Initially, NASA Langley's research focused on military applications, but recently has conducted a line of research in the area of head-worn displays for commercial and business aircraft. This work has revolved around numerous simulation experiments as well as flight tests to develop technology and data for industry and regulatory guidance. The paper summarizes the results of NASA's helmet-mounted/head-worn display research. Of note, the work tracks progress in wearable collimated optics, head tracking, latency reduction, and weight. The research lends credence that a small, sunglasses-type form factor of the head-worn display would be acceptable to commercial pilots, and this goal is now becoming technologically feasible. The research further suggests that a head-worn display may serve as an "equivalent" Head-Up Display (HUD) with safety, operational, and cost benefits. "HUD equivalence" appears to be the economic avenue by which head-worn displays can become main-stream on the commercial and business aircraft flight deck. If this happens, NASA's research suggests that additional operational bene fits using the unique capabilities of the head-worn display can open up new operational paradigms.