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The present research examines operational performance and verbal communication in airline flight crews under reduced crew operations (RCO). Eighteen two-pilot crews flew six scenarios under three conditions; one condition involved current-day operations while two involved RCO. In RCO flights, the Captain initially operated the simulated aircraft alone but could request remote crewmember support as off-nominal events occurred and workload was expected to increase. In one of the two RCO conditions, crewmembers were provided with advanced prototype collaboration tools designed to alleviate difficulties in crew coordination. Crews successfully solved all challenging events without accident and analyses of operational performance did not reveal any differences among the three conditions. In RCO flights, crew communication increased when tools were available relative to flights in which they were not; specifically, there were more acknowledgements and decision-making communications. These results suggest the collaboration tools enable higher degrees of crewmember awareness and/or coordination during distributed operations.

This paper reports on the performance and workload of pilots participating in a human-in-theloop simulation of interval management operations during a continuous descent approach (CDA) into Louisville International Airport (SDF).The experiment examined variations in pilot roles and responsibilities in an implementation of interval management automation.The roles and responsibility manipulation showed that whether pilots were instructed to follow speed guidance strictly, or to exercise their own judgment, had no effect on workload and only a small effect on interval management performance. However, requiring the pilots to manually enter speeds into the autopilot, rather than having the automation automatically update the autopilot, frequently led to poorer energy management, and higher spacing interval errors at the final approach fix, even in the conditions where pilots were instructed to strictly follow speed guidance. This finding was traced to poorer compliance with the automated speed guidance, lack of awareness of this poor compliance, and insufficient awareness of the energy state of the aircraft. These results suggest that some form of energy guidance may be needed to augment interval management. To do this, recommendations were made for integrating the spacing interval management automation with near-term or far-term energy management systems.Workload measurement showed that, when pilots were required to maneuver to avoid en route weather, the manual conditions resulted in an increase in workload, although the overall level would still be considered low under normal circumstances.

Pilot workload was examined during simulated flights requiring flight deck-based merging and spacing while avoiding weather. Pilots used flight deck tools to avoid convective weather and space behind a lead aircraft during an arrival into Louisville International airport. Three conflict avoidance management concepts were studied: pilot, controller or automation primarily responsible. A modified Air Traffic Workload Input Technique (ATWIT) metric showed highest workload during the approach phase of flight and lowest during the en-route phase of flight (before deviating for weather). In general, the modified ATWIT was shown to be a valid and reliable workload measure, providing more detailed information than post-run subjective workload metrics. The trend across multiple workload metrics revealed lowest workload when pilots had both conflict alerting and responsibility of the three concepts, while all objective and subjective measures showed highest workload when pilots had no conflict alerting or responsibility. This suggests that pilot workload was not tied primarily to responsibility for resolving conflicts, but to gaining and/or maintaining situation awareness when conflict alerting is unavailable.

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