There is little doubt that simulators have redefined the realm of initial and recurrent training in both Military and Commercial aviation. Cost benefits have been a primary consideration. Lowering the risk of training has been the other major benefit. Achieving balance between simulator and real-aircraft training time has been a subject of much debate and research. Leaning too much to either format has impact. On one side, cost impacts could be significant. On the other, the trainee has little feel for what it is like to be performing this tasks in a real aircraft.
There is also truth to the fact that some areas of training are better handled in a sim while others absolutely need an aircraft.
In my opinion, simulators have evolved to a point where they are close to ‘as real as it gets’. Transfer of training has proven to be effective. Aircrafts have become more technically advanced and a lot of training is focused on procedure and automation – an area where sims lend themselves to really well.
Replication of real-world weather, comms, terrain, flight dynamics have become possible. There isn’t a lot of loss in ambient factors in a simulator today.
In fact the term ‘supplement’ almost implies that sims are secondary. That has changed with time. In many areas, simulators end up being primary channels for training while aircraft-based training come in at an equal percentage or less.
Again, the one major risk of doing too much time in a sim is that it may lead to a situation where the trainee has little or no feel for what the real world circumstances will be like. This too, then comes down to how well real world factors are modeled into a simulation ecosystem – aka fidelity.
Category: flying
Aviation and Automation
Automation has eased workload on the flightdeck but, in turn, has also become a source of increased cognitive load on pilots (Salas & Maurino, 2010). Coherence has emerged as a necessary competency for modern day pilots. In order to mitigate surprises, pilots need to carry mental models of underlying systems and plausible use scenarios (Sherry et al., 2001). Coherence techniques can be enabled (or impeded) by a top-down human influence known as ‘Attention’ (Gibb, Gray & Scharff, 2010). Collectively, these expectations are onerous and it is important to ask whether the human mind can truly live up to them. This question is even more important given the levels of automation complexity in modern day aircraft.
One of the highlights of this week’s readings was the aspect of ‘coherence’ (Salas & Maurino, 2010). For coherence to be effective, pilots need to have a deep understanding of the underlying logic, systems and automation impacts. The cognitive load has grown significantly over the years and continues to grow even faster today. While it is possible to acquire and display a lot more data in the form of meaningful information on extra-rich customizable displays, an important consideration would be to understand at what point this reaches practical human limits.
In the end, there is no limit on information that can be provided or should be assimilated by the crew. What matters is how much can be meaningfully assimilated in limited amounts of time (many times minutes or seconds) and most importantly, acted upon to achieve an outcome.
Information overload occurs frequently and very rapidly. My humble observation is that a few different visual and aural call-outs occurring simultaneously (example: a GPWS callout and a TCAS alert) are enough to cause overload in an otherwise quiet flightdeck. If they occur to be in conflict, its worse. With rising stress levels, saturation occurs faster (Salas & Maurino, 2010). The ability to filter, and hone in, on important elements of information being presented is the answer to avoiding overwhelm. I believe that this ability is a function of two things – a) experience and b) personality.
I was reading the September 2015 issue of the Flying Magazine on my way back from a business trip recently. Les Abend, a 777 captain, who features a regular section in the magazine has an interesting article on simulators in the September edition. In fact, he specifically calls out to the evolving role of Human Factors in aviation. He also alludes to the topic of automation diluting core flying skills. Interesting read.
References
Abend, L. (2015, 09). IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE SIMULATOR. Flying, 142, 84-84,86. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/docview/1704438154?accountid=27203
Dunwoody, P. T. (2009). Introduction to the special issue: Coherence and correspondence in judgment and decision making. Judgment and Decision Making, 4(2), 113. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/docview/1011289242?accountid=27203
Foster, Jessica (2015, October 21). https://erau.instructure.com/courses/23563/discussion_topics/200361
Gibb, R., Gray, R., & Scharff, L. (2010). Aviation Visual Perception : Research Misperception and Mishaps. Farnham, Surrey, GBR: Ashgate Publishing Group. Retrieved from http://www.ebrary.com (Links to an external site.)
Ledesma, Julio. (2015, October 19). Message posted to https://erau.instructure.com/courses/23563/discussion_topics/200361
Mosier, K., Sethi, N., McCauley, S., Khoo, L., Richards, J., Lyall, E.. . Hecht, S. (2003). Factors impacting coherence in the automated cockpit. Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting Proceedings, 47(1), 31-31.
Salas, E., Jentsch, F., & Maurino, D. (Eds.). (2010). Human factors in aviation. Academic Press.
Sherry, L., Feary, M., Polson, P., & Palmer, E. (2001). What’s it doing now? Taking the covers off autopilot behavior. In Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Aviation Psychology (pp. 1-6).
The networked simulator
Over the past 6 months i have done so much work on my simulator that it made me think about writing this post on the compelling possibilities that arise from a networked simulator and a network of simulators.
Just over the past two weeks, in helping out our friends at PilotEdge, I was part of a team that generated traffic for testing avionics equipment and the TCAS system for a design team. Before that, i was part of a team that was itself testing a newly designed simulator. back in February of 2018, as part of study worm at Embry Riddle University, there were many discussions around the use of distributed remote ops concepts that could help build safety scenarios in the use of drones. While all or most of these are concepts, it is very apparent that the combinatorial power of a simulation appliance and the network is phenomenal.
The internet of things is here. Pretty much any device can be provisioned with an IP address. As such, it can participate in a network. The simulator was an extraordinarily useful safety and proficiency device. Combining it into a network has brought out a series of new possibilities. Real-time weather generation, traffic scenario generation, communications testing are just a few of those advantages.
The ability for a piece of simulation hardware to talk to learning management systems and learning content management systems is a valuable opportunity. Taking it a step further. if the learning management system was adaptive, this would add a new dimension to pacing learning based on learner assimilation and learner type. Now with the use of ML, the generation of scenarios based on measures of central tendency have become easier. Content packaging using SCORM and/or IMS makes for standard scenario packages. A learning record store provides for persistence in student progress tracking. Progress dashboards and giving the learner a unified experience becomes very possible. There are many other such benefits.
Aggregation has been the sought after path for several years. Simulators have arrived at that point now.
CJ
General Aviation fields
#GeneralAviation #airstrips can sometimes be hard to find in congested areas. There are approximately 17000 of these in the US, but we commonly only refer to the 5-10 large airports.
Here is one of them…
A piece of concrete speaks a story
A small strip of concrete or asphalt is a pilot’s friend. It’s reassuring and welcoming. The wear and tear on this #runway speaks a story.
#RealWorldCoastToCoast
The Internet provides most of us excellent access to continued learning in many fields. This learning comes in the form of shared experiences, dedicated training and opportunities for us to learn by doing. Pilots are students for life and the pursuit of safety and proficiency is an unending goal for pilots.
Recently, #PilotEdge founder Keith published videos that journaled his trip from the East Coast to the West Coast. The video set is titled – #RealWorldCoastToCoast and is available from #PilotWorkshops. The video describes Keith’s journey from New Jersey to Los Angeles in an experimental Lancair aircraft. Keith flies the entire distance alone, captures the entire journey on video by wearing multiple cameras on himself. The videos are broken in segments each mirroring one leg of his flight. For each flight leg, Keith provides a dedicated video segment that describes his pre-flight flight planning activity. Similarly, he also provides another video segment where he debriefs the flown segment.
I found the videos to be extraordinarily valuable and here are the different reasons why.
- Not very often does one get to see such a milestone journey be completed by a single pilot in a single-engine plane.
- Not often is such a journey journaled in this level of detail.
- It is extremely valuable to see the journey journaled in video, minute by minute and without being paraphrased.
Secondly, it is immensely valuable to see it happen live. Especially when you get to observe all the thinking that goes into flight planning and then observe how often many of those assumptions come undone while en-route. Having the tenacity to deal with those in real-time is absolutely critical and the videos clearly demonstrate that. A few examples follow…
Keith has poor radio comms early on in his journey. The issues it poses in congested airspace and his approach to mitigating risk is learning. At another point, he finds out that the runway at one of his selected airports is shorter than anticipated due to construction. To complicate matters, this is at a high elevation airport which means longer takeoff roll as it is. The quick analysis, math and his approach to determining his airplanes performance at that airport is a quality lesson on how one can be called upon to improvise on the fly. Keith speaks about the importance of good pilotage, dead reckoning skills. He constants looks for landing options and ensures his situational awareness. With the growth of GPS devices, and more recently the iPad as an EFB, native pilotage has been taking a back seat. There is an increasing dependance on electronic devices in flight. There is no doubt that they make for better situational guidance. However, they can also serve as distractions. There are many stories about pilots who are pre-occupied with, and heads-down in, their electronic devices rather than being alert and looking outside. Although Keith uses the iPad extensively for his journey, you never find Keith heads-down in it for any enduring period of time. There is also the risk of these electronics failing leaving the pilot with few choices other than going back to basic principles of VFR flight. There is more than occasion when he is faced with electronics failure for simple reasons such as overheating of the device from prolonged use. Cross-referencing techniques are practiced and demonstrated all through the journey. At one high altitude airport, Keith is faced with tuning the automated weather frequency only to find that it is out of service. He overflies the field and finds no windsock either. He decides to use groundspeed to determine which way the winds are flowing around the field. Another lesson! His arrival into KLAX is masterfully completed.
These are but a few of those lessons. The video series is filled with them.
Third, the debrief sessions where Keith describes what went wrong or where something could have been done better provide important lessons.
Experience is a great teacher, however, it isn’t always possible to experience everything yourself. Learning from being a part of someone’s experience is next best available tool. Reading was the traditional method. Audio brought it to life, but seeing it in video form and living through that journey.. flight by flight, segment by segment… is a very valuable model for learning.
I would recommend the product to anyone pursuing the goal of being a safer pilot…
Note: I purchased the product and I wrote this review to describe why I found the product valuable. I have not been paid to provide a review.
CPJ
Garmin’s Fenix 3 Altimeter, Barometer
Garmin has some distinct products. Their sport, fitness and aviator wearables are one of them. Many of their wearables have an altimeter, barometer and compass – and are commonly known as an ABC watch. I can’t resist the opportunity to try, test and use instruments and gauges. I went and out and got the D2 Bravo – an aviators watch. The D2 Bravo was in essence a Fenix3 modified with a new software platform and functionality meant specifically for aviation. An example of an aviation feature was the inclusion of an airport database. Another was the configuration of two right-side buttons to be the ‘Direct To’ and ‘Nearest’ buttons. The D2 Bravo didn’t stay with me for very long. Suffice it to say that I had to replace the D2 Bravo four times for various reasons which are beyond the scope of this post
After waiting a few days, I got the Fenix3 hoping that without the added aviation features, the Fenix3 by itself would work just fine for sport and fitness use and then the Fenix too had an altimeter, barometer and a compass built-in – the 3 things I was looking for. It also had built-in GPS.
I have always been an avid student of the variability of atmospheric pressure with altitude (as also temperature with altitude). Of course, it is imperative that aviators at any/all levels understand such variability really well. Not doing so can lead to serious trouble. The above relationships are simple and complicated at the same time.
The Fenix3 brought with it a period of use and study of the watch and the curiosity to figure out how it works or why it behaves a certain way. In particular it was the altimeter and barometer that were built into it. Part of it was the continuation of my interest in altimetry. For the sake of providing some context, here is what was happening. The altimeter would drift over time even if the watch and person wearing it would be in one place. As a means of calibration, the watch allows for calibrating altitude by inputting known elevation. but it does not allow us to use sea-level adjusted pressure as a means of calibration. This means that in order to use the watch for measuring elevation (also known as true altitude), the only way to do so is to know the elevation of a location and use that number to calibrate the Fenix3. If you observe closely, once you enter the elevation, the indicated sea-level adjusted pressure number in the pressure widget will change (expected, of course). As to why the Fenix3 was not designed to accept a sea-level corrected pressure number for calibration as the other option (say as published by the weather website or the local airport reading) baffles me. I have tried reading up but i have not found an answer.
In simple terms, there are 3 variables in this equation – Ambient Pressure, Elevation and Sea Level Adjusted Pressure.
Ambient Pressure +(-) Adjustment for Elevation = Sea Level Adjusted Pressure.
As can be seen above, one impacts the other two. Knowing two, we can find the third variable. Hence I cant figure out why Garmin decided to leave out the ability to set sea-level adjusted pressure as a calibration option.
There is a ton of material written in various forums varying from questions, answers, opinions, demands and rants around this topic – and there maybe no need for one more addition from me! I couldn’t resist writing up my view on this.
Lets for the time-being ignore that the watch (or the individual) has a GPS or any other device to measure altitude. The only device we have is this watch and the altimeter on it.
The first thing to note is that an altimeter will indicate some altitude at all times – the correctness of that indication is something we will come to further down in this post. Stated simply, the commonly found altimeter is actually a barometer that senses pressure. It’s just that the dial on an altimeter is calibrated to indicate altitude. The barometer senses ambient pressure (local pressure) at that location.
How does it then know what the altitude is? Well, we know that pressure is 29.92 inHg at sea level. We also know that pressure decreases with increasing elevation – approximately 1 inHg per 1000 ft of elevation. Then it becomes easy to infer that if the ambient pressure at my location read 28.92 inHg, I must be at a 1000 ft of elevation above sea level. Easy?
That MAY BE correct. That is NOT ALWAYS correct. Why? Because while on a standard day the above rule of pressure reduction may hold, there is hardly a standard day and even if there was, they are far and few. For one reason or the other things go non-standard very quickly. Imagine a storm moving through the area. What would happen to pressure in that situation? The pressure would begin drop. If you want to verify this, check out the surface weather charts for the US and compare it with the Doppler radar images (the ones that show green patches for rain, blue for ice etc). You will notice that the green patches will match up with the areas that have low pressure ‘L’ indicated on the surface charts.
Lets go back to our example. We are at a location and pressure indicates 28.92. Ideally this should be a 1000 ft elevation. Will it always be so – NO. That’s the first thing to note and understand.
Then what is the actual elevation – also referred to as “true altitude” of that location? We will not know unless we can calibrate the altimeter in one of two ways – a) local pressure adjusted to sea level OR (b) definite elevation of that location (as measured or surveyed). There is a 3rd option – GPS – but we already said earlier in this post that we are leaving that one out
Lets discuss the options above.
(a) – Local Pressure Adjusted to Sea Level
This number essentially is the pressure the location would be at if located at sea-level. This method of normalizing pressure at any geographic location (regardless of altitude) serves as a means of using the number for comparative purposes. To make this point clearer, imagine a location at sea level. Say the pressure at this point is standard – i.e. 29.92. Think of boarding an elevator at that exact location and going up a 1000 ft. On a standard day, the pressure at 1000 ft should be 28.92 (remember the thumb rule provided above – 1 inch drop per 1000 ft). While the ambient pressure at 1000 ft is 28.92, the sea level corrected pressure at that location will still be referred to as 29.92. This is very important to understand. Even if you went up another 1000 ft and the ambient pressure measured 27.82 (another inch less for the 1000 ft), the sea level corrected pressure at that point will still be 29.92. This is the reason that aircrafts arriving into an airport terminal area are provided the sea level corrected pressure (even if they are flying at that time at 10,000 ft). Pilots use that number to calibrate their altimeter (which is in fact a barometer) and thereafter they can rely on the indicated readings from that altimeter. Similarly, we could this option to calibrate any altimeter.
What happens if we are unable to know sea level corrected pressure for a certain area? We could use the other option.
(b) – Use known elevation of that location to calibrate the altimeter.
What is known elevation of a location? – Land surveys, topographic maps provide surveyed altitude of various locations. This is even more prevalent in areas where terrain is uneven. For example, while climbing up alpine mountains like Pilatus or Jungfrau, you will notice elevation marked at regular intervals. We could use these numbers to calibrate an altimeter.
If we don’t have either (a) or (b), then we indeed cannot calibrate our altimeter. This does not mean that we can’t use the altimeter. All we have lost at this point is the ability to determine our true altitude (elevation) from sea level. The altimeter is still useful in that it can be used to measure ascent or descent – in other words, to determine how many feet we have climbed or descended. How does this work? Remember an altimeter is a barometer that senses pressure. Regardless of whether we have been able to calibrate the altimeter to reflect true elevation, it is still sensing ambient pressure. If we climb from one point to another, it will detect a pressure change (a drop in this case) and by virtue of that drop, it will reflect a change in altitude (an increase in this case). Likewise, if we descended, the opposite cases would apply.
What does this mean? It means that if we are unable to calibrate our altimeter, we have lost the ability to measure our elevation (true altitude or height above sea level). However we are still able to measure altitude changes.
Given all of the above, the Fenix3 altimeter works exactly as expected. There are several individuals with this question and this post is to provide my understanding on how the Fenix3 altimeter works. In summary, Fenix3 faithfully records altitude changes caused by climbing or descending. If calibrated manually (or via GPS), it indicates those changes in terms of elevation. It sets sea-level pressure correctly when provided a known elevation.
Note that I am not providing any view on the accuracy of the Fenix altimeter over varying usage. I have not been able to get to testing that accuracy.
Note also that in the above discussion, I have stayed away from the topic of how the watch behaves when ambient pressure is varying simultaneously with change in altitude. That’s for a different post.
CP Jois
Chicago
Taxiways are reassuring
A million views in 3 weeks… watch it!
Golfcharlie232 publishes some of the most vibrant aviation videos. Popular as all of them are, this one got a million hits in 3 weeks. Am reposting it here to share with you all.