Pilot controller design using the CTU flight simulator for shared situation awareness

Safety in air transportation resides in effective pilot training and displays to reduced pilot errors. Many aviation accidents come from cockpit miscommunication which requires analysis of shared situation awareness between aviators which is a current research and development direction using the Czech Technical University (CTU) cockpit simulator. Specifically, the CTU simulator utilizes enhanced feedback to coordinate the control of the cockpit joysticks. With modern transport aircraft, the coordination between the pilot and the co-pilot enables safe flight, redundancy, as well as shared responsibilities. Teaming becomes challenging during avionics malfunctions as not all pilots have the same situation awareness. Thus, the Czech Technical University flight simulator has been designed to study the effects of team piloting and explore situations that require communication between the pilot and co-pilot to mitigate and recover from aircraft malfunctions. In this paper, we discuss the current design and implementation that makes use of hardware (stick control), software (visualization), and evaluation (human factors) to explore situations in which the team has a shared awareness or worse, when there is cognitive dissonance between the pilots in assessing the situation. Example cases are studied in which an avionics malfunction happens and both pilots are presented with similar and conflicting information to determine how they respond. CTU-design software called FlightGear Connector, described in the paper is freely available at Bitbucked or SourceForge. The performed analysis shows discrepancy in the pilot model determination which we would like to further explore and possibly use for pilot test scenario validation.