Testing of an on-board emergency flight planner

Faced with a failure aboard an aircraft, pilots must generate a flight-plan to effectively and safely control the plane to touchdown. However, forming a safe flight-plan requires accurately predicting the complex interaction of the hybrid discrete-continuous behaviors of the pilot-aircraft system. It was hypothesized that an in-flight planning tool would aid the pilot in forming and verifying flight-plans. A two-stage process was used to determine whether this was true. First, a prototype was developed that contained the core concepts required for such a system. Then an experiment was performed to investigate the usefulness of this prototype and to gather general information about how pilots plan following an emergency and how cockpit systems might aid in this process. This paper discusses the results of the experiment.