ABSTRACT
Flight deck automation has substantially influenced one of the most enduring themes in aviation human factors: situation awareness. The computer usually does the right, expected thing—in other words, the complacency is automation induced. Appealing to a crew’s lack of motivation ignores or even misrepresents how automation has profoundly changed the operating environment and the tasks and roles of the people in the system. Cali shows that automation awareness is in part a function of collaboration. Don Williams flagged the unusual aircraft behaviour and drew Tafuri’s attention to it. Automation can interact with these different mental models and propagate them all the way to fully fledged and unrecoverable confusion. The chapter explores how trade-offs in sources of experimental controllability and validity require to search for new approaches that can push the research frontier into systematic empirical studies of three-way co-ordination breakdowns between two crewmembers and their automated cockpit partner.
