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 System-Wide Safety project at NASA is developing the concept and a subset of supporting technologies for evolving safety management from a post-accident iterative improvement on safety performed by large commercial operators only to predictive and increasingly autonomous safety functions that are performed during operations across vehicles, airports, and services. The system of interest is the In-time Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS), recommended by the National Academies for NASA to develop the concept in coordination with the broad and diverse community of stakeholders in aviation safety. Because the system context is the airspace and aviation industry, it is important to create and maintain traceability from the research work and system architecture elements developed at NASA to community-created roadmaps and aviation agency guidance.

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.

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.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been conducting an investigation of human interaction with critical elements of NASA’s Launch Termination System (LTS). This safety-critical system requires quick decision making on the part of highly trained users in order to maintain safe launch operations. A team of NASA evaluators has completed a detailed assessment aimed at improving the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of NASA’s Range Data Display System (RDDS), a key component of the LTS. The RDDS forms the vital man-machine link which ingests high volumes of system data in real-time and displays this data to NASA’s Range Safety personnel to enable them to assess launch vehicle trajectory and performance status. The RDDS displays the real-time state of the launch vehicle and its complex subsystems to users in order to support arm/destruct decisions (made by NASA’s Range Safety personnel) to facilitate safe launch operations. These decisions are highly time-sensitive, and users must act quickly in order to prevent serious injury or death and extensive damage to equipment or property. The NASA assessment team performed a Cognitive Task Analysis (CTA) to derive the user informational requirements needed to develop data driven, user information software requirements in support of a new RDDS software upgrade. The CTA was designed to address the unique aspects of this particular system, while focusing on the operational context within which the system is used by highly specialized personnel. This analysis and the resulting requirements form the first step in providing human factors guidance to software developers throughout the design, development, and fielding of the new RDDS software GUI. This paper will focus on the applied human factors methods and techniques employed, how these methods and techniques were used to derive user information design requirements, the lessons learned from this activity, and areas for future work. The authors intend to provide human factors practitioners with an example of how CTA methods and techniques may be adapted to meet the particular needs of a project, with special consideration given to the design of safety-critical systems.

The Minimum Operational Performance Standards (MOPS) for Detect and Avoid (DAA) Systems outline a well-clear and alerting definition for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) transitioning to and from Class A airspace or special use airspace [1]. This Phase 1 DAA well-clear (DWC) and alerting definition however, may produce losses of well clear (LoWC) and alerting undesirable to UAS operators when operating in the terminal environment, as the expectation of separation between aircraft in the terminal environment is reduced [2]. The ranges at which alerts are excited by normal terminal operations have implications on how a DAA system switches between an en-route and a terminal area DWC and alerting definition. In order to investigate this, an open loop fast time simulation study of UAS operations in a terminal environment was conducted by researchers at NASA Langley Research Center in order to investigate a terminal area DWC and alerting definition. Encounters were modeled with a UAS on a straight-in approach and traffic on various segments of a nominal visual traffic pattern to investigate the impact of integrating Detect and Avoid (DAA) for UAS into the terminal environment. The definition of well-clear was varied between the Phase 1 en-route DWC definition and a prospective terminal area DWC definition. Intruder performance, UAS performance, and flight trajectories were varied to represent a broad range of operations around an airport. Excitation of the Phase 1 MOPS alert thresholds for both the enroute and terminal area DWC were recorded through the collection of aircraft positions relative to the runway at alert threshold. Results indicate that both the terminal and en-route DWC definitions would excite early alert thresholds for aircraft on the 45° traffic pattern entry segment, indicating that the current alerting criterion would cause temporary alerts that may be undesirable to UAS operators. Late alert thresholds would also be excited for aircraft on the 45° entry segment using the en-route DWC definition defined in DO-365. Alerting for traffic on downwind was dependent on the Horizontal Miss Distance (HMD) threshold and the traffic's lateral distance from the runway centerline. These results have implications for how DAA systems will transition between the terminal area and en-route DWC.

As Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) make their way to mainstream aviation operations within the National Airspace System (NAS), research efforts are underway to develop a safe and effective environment for their integration into the NAS. Detect and Avoid (DAA) systems are required to account for the lack of “eyes in the sky” due to having no human on-board the aircraft. The technique, results, and lessons learned from a detailed End-to-End Verification and Validation (E2-V2) simulation study of a DAA system representative of RTCA Special Committee(SC)-228’s proposed Phase I DAA Minimum Operational Performance Standards (MOPS), based on specific test vectors and encounter cases, will be presented in this paper.

As Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) make their way to mainstream aviation operations within the National Airspace System (NAS), research efforts are underway to develop a safe and effective environment for their integration into the NAS. Detect and Avoid (DAA) systems are required to account for the lack of eyes in the sky due to having no human on-board the aircraft. The technique, results, and lessons learned from a detailed End-to-End Verification and Validation (E2-V2) simulation study of a DAA system representative of RTCA SC-228's proposed Phase I DAA Minimum Operational Performance Standards (MOPS), based on specific test vectors and encounter cases, will be presented in this paper.

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) are no longer technological systems of the unforeseeable distant future, but rather of the present and near future. They are systems that are evolving quickly and will soon become commonplace in the National Airspace System (NAS). However, opening the NAS to civil UAS is a challenging task, a task that encompasses multiple safety issues which include detect-and-avoid implementations, self-separation procedures, and collision avoidance technologies to remain well clear of other aircraft. Routine access to the NAS will require UAS to have new equipage, standards, rules and regulations, and procedures, among others, in addition to many supporting research efforts to answer difficult questions concerning how these aircraft will operate in airspace with manned aircraft. As a result, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has established a multi-center "UAS Integration in the NAS" project to examine essential safety concerns, in collaboration with the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) and industry, regarding the integration of UAS in the NAS. Among these guiding research efforts were the NASA Langley Research Center's Controller Acceptability Study (CAS) series, which looked at how Air Traffic Controllers would maintain traffic separation in busy airspace when some of the aircraft were UAS with detect-and-avoid equipment.

With the rapid growth of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), NASA was called upon to examine crucial operational and safety concerns regarding the integration of UAS into the National Airspace System (NAS) in collaboration with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and industry. Key research efforts paper focused on understanding and developing requirements for Detect and Avoid (DAA) systems and making sure they are interoperable with Collision Avoidance (CA) technologies. These requirements detail necessary performance of a DAA system designed to help the UAS pilot maintain DAA Well Clear (DWC) from intruder aircraft so that safe separation is retained. NASA Langley’s Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) simulation study known as Collision Avoidance, Self-Separation, and Alerting Times (CASSAT) addressed these DAA requirements in a two-phase study. The first phase examined eleven active air traffic controllers. The second phase, addressed in this paper, examined twelve pilots’ interactions with DAA systems at simulated UAS ground control stations (GCS).

This paper provides an overview of a Detect and Avoid (DAA) concept developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for integration of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) into the National Airspace System (NAS), and provides results from human-in-the-loop experiments performed to investigate interoperability and acceptability issues associated with use of the concept with these vehicles and operations. The series of experiments was designed to incrementally assess critical elements of the new concept and the enabling technologies that will be required.

BACKGROUND: Over the past 10-15 yr, considerable research has occurred for the development, testing, and fielding of real-time Datalink weather products for general aviation (GA) pilots to use before and during flight. As is the case with the implementation of most new technologies, work is needed to ensure that the users (in this case, the pilots) understand both the capabilities and limitations of the new technologies as well as how to use the new systems to improve their task performance. The purpose of this study was to replicate and extend a previous study on training pilots how and when to use these new weather technologies.METHOD: This field study used a quasi-experimental design (pre- vs. post-test with a control group). There were 91 GA pilots from the Midwest, Northeastern, and Southeastern United States who participated in a 2-h short course or a control activity. The lecture-based short course covered radar basics, Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD), NEXRAD specifics/limitations, thunderstorm basics, radar products, and decision making.RESULTS: The pilots who participated in the course earned higher knowledge test scores, improved at applying the concepts in paper-based flight scenarios, had higher self-efficacy in post-training assessments as compared to pre-training assessments, and also performed better than did control subjects on post-test knowledge and skills assessments.DISCUSSION: GA pilots lack knowledge about real-time Datalink weather technology. This study indicates that a relatively short training program was effective for fostering Datalink weather-related knowledge and skills in GA pilots.

Recent developments in avionics have allowed pilots of General Aviation (GA) aircraft to access more in-flight information than ever before, among them being data link weather services. However data link resources, namely next generation radar (NEXRAD), possess discrete limitations which can lead pilots into dangerous situations if they do not interpret the information correctly. The present study evaluated a training module designed to help pilots interpret and use data link NEXRAD weather information. GA pilots in the Midwest and Northeastern U.S. completed a face-to-face lecture course which covered the capabilities and limitations of NEXRAD based weather products and included paper based scenarios to give course participants practice using NEXRAD as a tool for decision making. A comparison of Pre- vs. post- test performance indicated that pilots had significant increases in radar knowledge, performance on application scenarios, and self-efficacy after completing the training.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been mandated by the Congressional funding bill of 2012 to open the National Airspace System (NAS) to Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). With the growing use of unmanned systems, NASA has established a multi-center "UAS Integration in the NAS" Project, in collaboration with the FAA and industry, and is guiding its research efforts to look at and examine crucial safety concerns regarding the integration of UAS into the NAS. Key research efforts are addressing requirements for detect-and-avoid (DAA), self-separation (SS), and collision avoidance (CA) technologies. In one of a series of human-in-the-loop experiments, NASA Langley Research Center set up a study known as Collision Avoidance, Self-Separation, and Alerting Times (CASSAT). The first phase assessed active air traffic controller interactions with DAA systems and the second phase examined reactions to the DAA system and displays by UAS Pilots at a simulated ground control station (GCS). Analyses of the test results from Phase I and Phase II are presented in this paper. Results from the CASSAT study and previous human-in-the-loop experiments will play a crucial role in the FAA's establishment of rules, regulations, and procedures to safely, efficiently, and effectively integrate UAS into the NAS.