Modeling situation assessment to improve pilot safety

Aircraft accidents are always a tragedy, especially when they could have been avoided. In some cases simply bringing the pilot's attention to a specific dial could have made a significant difference in avoiding a fatal crash. Recently, a large body of work has been done not only in studies of pilot attention and workload, but also in developing systems whose purpose is to ease that workload, and to help pilots avoid accidents and potentially save lives. In this session, we have invited speakers whose particular expertise in the area of pilot modeling and decision support complement each other. The goal is to bring about a deeper awareness of the key issues, and to highlight some of the significant advances that have been made recently. These advances benefit the entire human factors community in helping to create a stronger common basis for designing human-computer interactions. One factor which we noted early in the organization of this session was the relatively high percentage of human error that was cause in aircraft accidents. Between 1984 and 1994, 53.3% of major airline fatal accidents were caused by pilot error, and an even more astonishing 73.7% of commuter aircraft fatal accidents were caused by pilot error.