ABSTRACT
The aviation NextGen environment will be substantially different from the current National Airspace (NAS) operations. More and more sophisticated automation will enable innovations such as trajectory-based flight plans with precision paths from take-off to landing, aircraft self-separation and traffic avoidance, electronic flight bags, datalink communications, all-weather operations on very closely-spaced parallel runways (VCSPR). Flight crews will be required to interact proficiently with new automated systems and engage them for the flying tasks. Increasingly complex automated systems, however, will pose formidable challenges to crew decision making and resource management. System design and crew training will need to be mindful to the capabilities and limitations of human cognition and decision making to ensure safe operations in the NextGen airspace. In this chapter we describe what experienced crews and automation bring to the decision process in NextGen; define challenges and impediments to cognition,
decision making and human automation interaction; and present guidelines for system design and crew training.
