Ubiquitous big data vs. human frailty on the flight deck

Resiliency has been built into airframes and systems with accelerating success. The art of building resiliency into the human element on the flight deck has also advanced since the days of lone pilots, but not as dramatically. The teamwork of Captain and First Officer has achieved much, even recovering from the removal of Second Officers after their flight engineering tasks became largely automated. In an impressively large majority of cases, the teamwork gets the flights there safely, on time or nearly, and efficiently. But sometimes the teamwork breaks down, primarily because crew members are human beings with their own share of frailties. An obvious task of avionics suites is to support the crew with the right amount of information, not too little nor too much; a less obvious task is to help with factors that are more psychological than mechanical. I've classified these human frailties into five levels, with examples drawn from recent incidents: capable but distracted, insufficiently trained, impaired, totally disabled, and capable but wrong-headed. At the lower levels, applying best user-interface practices can push necessary data to crews that should be requesting it, or supplying remedial training pointers. Considerable ingenuity has been expended on ways to alert inattentive pilots, and those efforts can be enhanced by sending highly specific data. At the more dysfunctional levels, avionics elements can even intervene when necessary, which raises profound questions about where the ultimate responsibility lies for an aircraft's operation. At all levels, polling an aircraft's avionics for fuller information than is routinely transmitted may be helpful. The infrastructure that defines the era of Big Data offers opportunities to address the higher-level issues that we can call psychological. This paper explores some ways to apply unlimited digital information to achieve resiliency from the problems caused by human frailties on the flight deck.