Understanding the Utility of Digital Flight Assistants: A Preliminary Analysis

Abstract

Interactions with intelligent systems have become common in domestic and professional life. However, little is known about how pilots, who already work in a highly automated environment, envisage using intelligent systems in their work environment. This preliminary analysis investigates pilots' needs and wants for digital flight assistants (DFAs) through an interview study. We show that the adoption of DFAs may be hindered by pre-existing concerns, such as inadequate automatic speech recognition, linked to past experiences with digital assistants. Furthermore, we identify important contextual and environmental factors that will need to be accounted for in the design of DFAs such as "cross cockpit" relationships, noisy environments, or pilot's cognitive workload. CCS CONCEPTS• Hardware → Emerging interfaces; • Human-centered computing → Natural language interfaces.

Conversational Information Seeking

“…It is well known that enterprise search applications have different needs than a traditional web search engine, including challenges such as searching over enterprise Intranets or multiple internal sources (Hawking, 2004). Furthermore, besides the use of CIS systems in a traditional office environment, many different applications of more varied and complex environments such as airplane pilots create an extra layer of complexity (Arnold et al, 2020;Gosper et al, 2021). Many open problems in the intersection of CIS applications and enterprise need further investigation.…”