Flight Path Monitoring: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - 11/1/2016

Barbara Burian

Flight path monitoring and autoflight systems that often control an aircraft’s flight path continue to challenge pilots. "Flight Path" includes both the aircraft's trajectory and energy state and pertains to anytime the aircraft is in motion, including during taxi. "Flight Path Management" involves knowing where the aircraft is supposed to be, putting it there (manually or through automation), and then keeping it there. It is the monitoring of aircraft, automation, and co-pilot behavior and active intervention when something is off that assures the "keeping it there" part of flight path management. Yet monitoring on the flight deck so often fails (see, for example, a study conducted by Key Dismukes and Ben Berman: Checklists and monitoring in the cockpit: Why crucial defenses sometimes fail). Why is that? Monitoring requires attention, attention management, comprehension, predication, and action. Let's take a look at each and how they contribute to difficulties pilots have in actively monitoring their flight paths.

Attention is the awareness or taking notice of something or someone. Like so many cognitive abilities, attention, or rather how much we are able to attend to at a given time, is finite. Some liken attention to a spotlight that we move around our environments and only that which is "illuminated" by the spotlight is attended to. This conception however, narrows "attention" to a visual process, when in fact attention exists in all of our sensory domains (e.g., auditory attention: hearing or "tuning out" an alert). Additionally, even when something is "illuminated by the spotlight" it doesn't mean that the thing is actually being attended to; many of us have had the experience of looking at something without really seeing it, such as when we look at the takeoff flaps gage and "see" flaps 5 when in fact the needle is pointing to flaps 1. In the case of "looking without seeing," expectation bias and/or not allowing adequate time for the eyes to physically fixate on the item being looked at are often the culprits.

Now, if our job as a pilot was to only attend to one thing, we would probably be able to do it without much difficulty. However, there is a wide range of things that we have to attend to including the status of aircraft systems and alerts and system configurations; automation modes and the aircraft's flight path; what our co-pilot, the flight attendants and passengers (if any) are up to; communications from ATC and the company; and external factors such as weather, airport and navaid status, traffic, and terrain. We can't attend to all of these things at once so must manage what we are attending to at any one time and make sure that we keep shifting our attention as appropriate so that we don't fixate on one or two things and that everything is attended to or “sampled” as necessary. This is extremely challenging to do; experience and practice certainly helps but anything out of the ordinary, such as a non-normal situation or automation that is "misbehaving" can throw off good attention management.

We've already mentioned how things such as cognitive biases can compromise comprehension or understanding of what is being monitored. There are a number of other factors that can challenge comprehension such as confusing taxiway signage and ambiguous or inconsistent alerts and cues. Comprehension can be taxed when effortful cognitive processing is required, such as when something out of the ordinary, confusing, or unexpected is encountered.

The incomplete or inaccurate understanding that some pilots still have of their autoflight systems often contributes to their difficulty in monitoring their flight path. Modes transition automatically, sometimes to modes that were not programmed by the pilot, and annunciation of the modes is still largely limited to small alphanumeric displays that aren't co-located with the mode control panel where pilots select the modes they desire. All of this contributes to pilots having difficulty in predicting what mode might occur next and their aircraft's behavior relative to it. The FMS has also been know to "suck in fingers and eyes" through programming tasks further challenging good attention management. Even having said all this, however, autoflight systems and the FMS can lull us into a sense that all is well and under control (i.e., automation complacency). This tendency to "over trust" the automation can make it difficult to maintain the active cognitive engagement required in monitoring.

We believe that effective flight path monitoring also involves action, namely timely intervention when all that is being monitored is not what it should be. This action, however, will be late, if it happens at all, if all the other aspects of monitoring (attention, attention management, comprehension, and prediction) do not occur as they should.

Barbara Burian recently gave two workshops at the 2016 Bombardier Safety Standdown in Wichita, Kansas entitled Flight Path Monitoring: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. In this presentation she explores these barriers and challenges to effective flight path monitoring as well as several others including: misunderstanding monitoring roles and responsibilities; workload and time pressure; fatigue; interruptions and distractions; lack of feedback to pilots when monitoring lapses; procedures; external contributors; company culture; and training. We look forward to your comments, experiences with flight path monitoring (both good and bad) and techniques you've developed to ensure effective flight path monitoring.
 

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