"Automation Surprise" in Aviation

Abstract

Conflicts between the pilot and the automation, when pilots detect but do not understand them, cause “automation sur- prise” situations and jeopardize flight safety. We conducted an experiment in a 3-axis motion flight simulator with 16 pi- lots equipped with an eye-tracker to analyze their behavior and eye movements during the occurrence of such a situation. The results revealed that this conflict engages participant’s at- tentional abilities resulting in excessive and inefficient visual search patterns. This experiment confirmed the crucial need to design solutions for detecting the occurrence of conflict- ual situations and to assist the pilots. We therefore proposed an approach to formally identify the occurrence of “automa- tion surprise” conflicts based on the analysis of “silent mode changes” of the autopilot. A demonstrator was implemented and allowed for the automatic trigger of messages in the cock- pit that explains the autopilot behavior. We implemented a real-time demonstrator that was tested as a proof-of-concept with 7 subjects facing 3 different conflicts with automation. The results shown the efficacy of this approach which could be implemented in existing cockpits.