ABSTRACT

This entry focuses on NASA’s role in human factors for aviation systems, primarily with flight crews, maintenance, and air traffic control (see Orlady and Orlady 1999; Hart 2001). All the issues described here are also applicable to space human factors research. A companion entry in this work provides a complementary look at NASA’s role in space human factors that focuses on habitability and sustainability (Mount 2004). In contrast, this chapter focuses on supervisory control and automation, crew resource management, human performance modeling, mental workload, decision-making, fatigue countermeasures, and “crew factors” related to the design of procedures, documentation, and training. The paradigm of supervisory control is

invoked when one or more human operators monitor a highly automated system and takes occasional control actions as needed to maintain proper system performance. Thus, issues of automation design and display design (and related issues in the design of virtual environments) are critical. Secondly, teamwork within the flight crew has been institutionalized within the airlines as crew resource management (CRM) and remains a key part of airline training and practice. Thus, issues of communication and social and organizational factors are crucial. Third, NASA’s wideranging research programs on human performance modeling have led to key advances in modeling human visual and auditory processes, perceptual and motor adaptation, attention, and memory in the context of complex multitask systems. Fourth, NASA pioneered the study of mental workload with the NASA Task Load Index (NASA TLX) scale. Fifth, NASA was a major participant in the development of the “naturalistic decision-making” paradigm that offered an alternative to traditional “rational choice” theories of decision-making. This perspective led to new insights into risk management in dynamic decision-making tasks. Sixth, NASA has pioneered in the identification and understanding of the sleep and circadian systems in the aviation environment. NASA has led the development of appropriate countermeasures and the tailoring of predictive models for aeronautical operations. Finally, NASA has also developed many products for use by the airlines and other aviation customers that are improved checklists, documentation, procedures, and training curricula. The common thread that binds these topics together is a focus on human performance and human error in the context of complex dynamic aerospace systems — both the scientific understanding of performance in context, and the development of technologies and other countermeasures to mitigate risks associated with human error.