University of Iowa study focuses on improving pilot safety

IOWA CITY - Even with highly sophisticated cockpits and well-trained crews, planes continue to crash.

However, one University of Iowa study - in partnership with Boeing and Rockwell Collins - hopes to help get at exactly what can cause pilots to lose energy state awareness and sense of the plane's direction, which are a leading cause of plane crashes.

In other words, pilots can sometimes lose a sense of which way is up and the speed and altitude by which the plane is traveling. Because the physiology of a human isn't keen enough to detect those very subtle and smooth differences - and airline crews in this day and age typically fly with more automation, as opposed to using standard stick and rudder skills - that can cause crashes.

“Basically you're getting more and more angle of bank that is not intended, and you're not detecting it,” said Tom Schnell, project principal investigator and director of the UI's Operator Performance Library in the Center for Computer-Aided Design. “And crashes have occurred where crews just are not detecting it and the instruments were telling them the truth, but they weren't looking at them or interpreting them the right way.”

Schnell said fewer military pilots entering the pipeline for becoming commercial pilots also can have an effect, because those pilots get a lot of training flying upside down or sideways and know how to deal with those issues in high-stress situations. Often, that type of training is not emphasized in commercial pilot training programs, Schnell said.

Study's goals

He said the results of the study - which is funded by a three-year, $1.2 million grant from NASA - could help to create not only better equipment, but improved flight training programs and detect the root causes for pilots losing awareness.

“We're dinosaur creatures, we were made to walk on earth, not to fly, so flying can easily trick the inner ear and large parts of physiology that we can't understand which way is up or down,” said Timothy Etherington, principal systems engineer at Rockwell Collins. “Some instruments were created so we could sort that out, but it takes a lot of training in stressful situations.”

Though the  study is just concluding its first year - which consisted mostly of planning and obtaining equipment - years two and three will include testing pilot responses in L-29 flight test jet aircraft.

After being thoroughly briefed on safety procedures and the aircraft systems, test subjects will be instrumented with electrodes that can track their physiological responses. Then, with a safety crew in the front-seat cockpit, the subjects sit in a back-seat cockpit of a jet that's equipped with instrumentation more similar to that of a commercial airplane. During flight tests, testers with access to everything happening on the plane monitor and administer the experiment and the data coming in. Etherington said they hope to use the study's results to create more intuitive instrumentation inside commercial airplanes.

“Some people have different interpretations of the instruments, and so the whole idea of this research is to make instrumentation that is much more natural and looks more like looking out the window, and it helps that in stressful situations that is easy to interpret which way is up and which way is down in the airplane.”

All test subjects in the study will be commercial airline pilots.

The UI's Operator Performance Laboratory is the project lead, while Boeing and Rockwell Collins are subcontractors. Schnell said they plan to do testing on spatial disorientation awareness in year two, and energy state awareness testing in year three. If their findings indicate equipment improvements could be made, Etherington said they hope to develop them into a product.