SE207: Airplane State Awareness - Attitude and Energy State Awareness Technologies (R-D)
SE207: Airplane State Awareness - Attitude and Energy State Awareness Technologies (R-D)
Status: UNDERWAY
Background
The purpose of this Safety Enhancement is to outline research to be conducted by the aviation community (government, industry and academia) to enable the development, implementation, and certification of technologies that enhance flight crew awareness of airplane energy state and conditions likely to produce Spatial Disorientation.
Based on the problems uncovered in a Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST) study of 18 loss-of-control accidents and incidents, the analysis team recommended research into flight deck technologies that have the potential to mitigate the problems and contributing factors that lead to flight crew loss of airplane state awareness (ASA). The research should cover the following areas:
- Assess the relative benefits associated with various methods of displaying angle-of-attack on the flight deck
- Develop and refine algorithms and display strategies to provide control guidance for recovery from approach-to-stall or Stall
- Develop and refine systems that predict the future aircraft energy state and/or autoflight configuration if the current course of action is continued and provide appropriate alerting
- Cost-effective, user-centered flight deck alerting systems to alert flight crews to the two conditions that produced Spatial Disorientation in the airplane state awareness (ASA) event data set, which are:
- subthreshold rolls similar to those that have led to loss of control
- the somatogravic illusion
The research should focus on raising the technology readiness level (TRL) of these features to a level that enables cost-effective implementation and certification of these technologies.