Abstract. This project aimed to understand rapid crew transitions from a monitoring to a decision-making role, when asserting manual control of aircraft subsystems. Ten crews unknowingly flew a semicritical failure scenario in a full flight simulator, forcing several crew decision moments. Observations of automation-related (diagnostic) behavior were correlated with respective flight performance, revealing that specific competencies (related to knowledge, procedures, attitude toward automation, and teamwork) with automated systems led to significant performance gains. More importantly, the absence of these behaviors severely deteriorated performance and should not be underestimated in its potency to affect flight safety. These findings may form a foundation for developing and evaluating near-future innovations in training, operations, and automation design, which could prove critical toward improving future accident rates.

Simulation components are the building blocks for simulators and can be used in more than one type of simulator. To enable cost-effective simulator development through reuse and exchange of simulator components, component and distributed simulation technologies can play an important role. Based on the principles of the High Level Architecture (HLA), a componentbased simulation architecture for a training system has been proposed by Dutch Space, TNO-FEL and the National Aerospace Laboratory NLR. The federate is composed of various simulation components that interact using the same architecture and infrastructure as well as the overall HLA federation. Verification of the improved architecture performance has been performed by the NLR. The NLR Pilot Station has been restructured in accordance with the component-based concept and an experiment has been set up and carried out to measure the performance with an emphasis on latency issues. Comparison of the component-based simulation architecture with the performance of the validated NLR flight simulation facilities shows the capabilities.-17-NLR-TP-2002-470 Figure 5: HLA communication time per simulation cycle The average HLA communication time per simulation cycle was 5-10 milliseconds for the Controls component, 15-30 milliseconds for the Avionics component and 27-50 milliseconds for the Aircraft dynamics component. The computer on which the Aircraft dynamics component ran was indeed the slowest of the three and the average time per simulation cycle for the HLA communication process limits the simulation frequency to 20-40 Hertz. Besides the average time the maximum time and the variation are important for real-time applications. In the

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Traditionally the Flight Simulation Department of the National Aerospace Laboratory NLR is strong in high fidelity human-in-the-loop flight simulation. In order to open up more possibilities for NLR flight simulators as participants in networked simulation exercises, NLR started the project MAPLESIM. During the first part of this project a high-performance network has been created between several of NLR's military flight simulations in combination with computer generated forces using the simulation package ITEMS. This network makes use of NLR's deterministic reflective memory network (SCRAMNet) for real-time distribution of the critical data. This enables data to be distributed at high rates (50 Hz). The next step in this project is a connection between this high performance network and "external" simulations. Two different approaches are followed to realise this connection with the outside world. The first has been a DIS(Distributed Interactive Simulation)-based connection. This DIS gateway has been developed in the summer of 2000. For the second gateway to external simulations an HLA (High Level Architecture) protocol interface unit will be developed. This will make it possible to integrate the NLR simulation environment into a complete synthetic environment, together with Command & Control systems, tactical wargaming tools and exercise observation and evaluation tools. SmartFED, an in-house developed tool that facilitates that proprietary simulators at various geographic locations participate in a joint simulation, will control this environment.