Flight procedures automation: Towards flight autonomy in manned aircraft

Safe aviation operations rely on the flight crews' adherence to operating procedures for normal, abnormal and emergency situations. Crew operations can be enhanced by applying a certain automation level to procedures (both on commanded actions and monitoring aspects), thus reducing pilot workload and increasing the crews' mental spare capacity. Succeeding in partial automation of flight procedures is deemed a first step towards flight autonomy substantiated on Artificial-Intelligence (AI) based systems in the long term. It also paves the way towards reduced crew or unmanned operations. This paper presents Cockpit Automation Procedures System (CAPS) as an initial prototype of this kind of automation. This technology, developed as contributor to Enhanced Flight Operations and Functions within the Clean Sky 2 framework, is capable of automatically executing crew procedures with an adjustable automation level and authority delegation and enables monitoring of pilot actions on cockpit controls. A CAPS prototype has been developed considering representative operational scenarios to evaluate its contribution on crew workload and performance. An analysis is presented in this report that substantiates how the CAPS prototype design criteria have been established as well as automation levels. The analysis presented has targeted abnormal and emergency procedures such as engine failures, but the concept and prototype can be extended to other procedures. Several findings have been uncovered during this exercise: first and foremost, the safety challenges that a potential certification of this critical function poses. Given its potential ability to control all aircraft, the function criticality, required design assurance, redundancy, override in case of failure, etc. are issues that need deeper analysis. Other challenges include the human factors considerations such as loss of situational awareness depending on automation proposed or autonomy in the future. Besides, current aircraft systems and cockpit in the CAPS-hosting platform impose constraints that need to be addressed: CAPS could not be retrofitted on current aircraft cockpits, where systems' controls are still ultimately based in mechanical or hydraulic means. Smart, adaptive cockpit controls with hybrid man-controlled and machine-controlled modes are required to enable CAPS and pilots coexistence. This paper contributes in demonstrating the feasibility of including procedure automation into flight decks, while addressing the safety repercussions of the system actions, depicting the new Human Factors challenges arisen in the process and describing the next steps necessary towards full machine-controlled scenarios.