Crew Schedules, Sleep Deprivation, and Aviation Performance

ScienceDaily (Apr. 24, 2012) — Night-time departures, early morning arrivals, and adjusting to several time zones in a matter of days can rattle circadian rhythms, compromise attention and challenge vigilance. And yet, these are the very conditions many pilots face as they contend with a technically challenging job in which potentially hundreds of lives are at stake.

In an article to be published in a forthcoming issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, John A Caldwell, a psychologist and senior scientist at Fatigue Science, a Honolulu business focusing on fatigue assessment, examines the problem of sleep deprived pilots by teasing out the complex interplay of inadequate sleep and circadian rhythms. He explains how airline industry solutions miss the point and then suggests other options.

Caldwell points out that "fatigue-related performance problems in aviation have been consistently underestimated and underappreciated, despite the fact that decades of research on pilots and other operational personnel has clearly established that fatigue from insufficient sleep significantly degrades basic cognitive performance, psychological mood, and fundamental piloting skills."

Evidence abounds. In 2004, a corporate airlines flight crashed as it approached Kirksville Regional Airport; in 2008, Honolulu based pilots of Go! Airlines overshot their destination by more than thirty miles because they fell asleep during a trip that was only fifty minutes long. A Northwest Airlines Flight overflew its destination by 150 miles because pilots had dozed off at the controls. In 2009, fifty people were killed when a Continental Connection flight en route from Newark to Buffalo crashed into a house. Pilots failed to respond properly to a stall warning and the flight went out of control.

After examining what went wrong, the NTSB concluded that, "the pilots' performance was likely impaired because of fatigue." Since 1990 the US National Transportation Safety Board has placed pilot fatigue on the Most Wanted List of safety related priorities.

Why? Because as fatigue increases, "accuracy and timing degrade, lower standards of performance are accepted, the ability to integrate information from individual flight instruments into a meaningful and overall pattern declines, and attention narrows. "

In one study, F-117 pilots were deprived of one night of sleep and then were tested on precision instruments. Not only did pilot errors on those instruments double after one night of sleep loss, pilots reported feeling depressed and confused.

Clearly fatigue is fundamentally the result of insufficient sleep, but for pilots the important issue is the consequences of that sleep loss when they are sitting at the control panel. The author suggests that "fatigue related risks increase substantially when (a) the waking period is longer than 16 hours, (b) the preduty sleep period is shorter than 6 hours, or (c) the work period occurs during the pilot's usual sleep hours."  READ MORE: Science Daily

Boeing Files Patent for 'Super Sonic Cruiser'

The Boeing Aircraft Company apparently wants to make sure it has some technology protected for possible future use in its aircraft.

The picture above is a representation of the "Patent" filed with the U.S. Patent Office. Look pretty super, huh?

Gizmodo reports that among the changes are engines placed over the wings ... the patent drawing shown is vaguely reminiscent of the engine nacelles on the Starship Enterprise ... with vertical stabilizers and variable geometry chevrons much like the F-35. It features a canard configuration like the previous design.

XCOR Street Bike Used As Platform To Test Propulsion Parts For Lynx Suborbital Vehicle

Let's just say you're an innovative aerospace company building a suborbital vehicle for the commercial space market ... and you're looking for a cost-effective way to test some parts for the propulsion system. Does a motorcycle come immediately to mind?

Whether or not it was immediate, that is how XCOR has conducted some of the tests on a rocket propellant piston pump ... on a ride from Roswell, NM to Mojave, CA last month.

"We debated how best to put many hours of wear time on the critical bearing components of our rocket propellant piston pump, that are subject to significant wear and tear," said Dan DeLong, XCOR Chief Engineer.  "This particular motorcycle, the Triumph Street Triple, develops about the same horsepower and has the same cylinder arrangement as the liquid oxygen and kerosene fuel pumps for the Lynx suborbital spacecraft.  That makes it ideal for a long-life pump test platform.  The bike is much less expensive to operate than the full up rocket pump test stand.  We're adding hours of run time each ride, not just minutes."

The motorcycle was customized for the XCOR rocket piston pump technology and then shipped to Motion Performance in Roswell.  There XCOR engineers finished modifying and testing the bike for the trip. After making presentations at local schools with the bike as part of XCOR's ongoing Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) educational outreach efforts, the XCOR team was given a send-off by Roswell Mayor Del Jurney and members of the Roswell-Chaves County Economic Development Corporation. The trip symbolically started at the Robert Goddard Museum which honors the father of modern liquid rocketry and his early pioneering work in Roswell.  READ MORE: AeroNews

Boeing Says Efficiencies On The Factory Floors Will Allow Hiring To Slow

Boeing says it plans to increase airliner production as airlines place major orders to replace older jets, but that efficiencies on its factory floors will allow it to slow the pace of hiring replacement workers.

In an interview with Dow Jones Newswires, Boeing VP for Marketing Randy Tinseth said that airline passenger growth is expected to continue to grow by about 5 percent this year, after a 6% jump last year, even with the global economic recovery continuing as a sluggish pace. Tinseth described the backlog of orders for new airliners as a "challenge"

But the Puget Sound Business Journal reports that Boeing's workforce will peak at about 83,000 this year, and then the pace of hiring will slow. The company will continue to replace retiring workers, but at a reduced pace from previous years.  READ MORE: AINOnline

Hawker Beechcraft Remains Open During Reorganization

Hawker Beechcraft received federal bankruptcy court approval on Friday to continue operating during the reorganization process that follows the Wichita OEM’s filing for protection under Chapter 11 the previous day. The court decision will allow HBC to continue paying employees and vendors subsequent to the May 3 bankruptcy filing by allowing it access to $400 million in debtor-in-possession financing that was part of a pre-arranged restructuring.

In an interview yesterday, executive v-p Shawn Vick told AIN the company has set up a schedule for payments to vendors and suppliers that will allow the manufacturer to continue producing airplanes, and that “it is our intent to continue to support aircraft on a business-as-usual basis.”

READ MORE: AINOnline

FAA Reports Progress on NextGen System

It’s clear that the final release of the FAA’s Authorization Act has given a new fillip to the agency’s NextGen implementation activity. The 2012 Plan, released in March, has a much more upbeat flavor than its 2011 predecessor, which essentially looked backwards at accomplishments in 2010, when most activities were still in their early stages. Back then, the potential future benefits of NextGen were just that–potential.

Now, the 2012 Plan reports on significant progress in operational implementations over the previous 12 months, when users started to obtain actual benefits, and the plan will doubtless provide more community confidence that NextGen is going to do all–or at least most–of the things it originally promised. For example, the 2011 Plan outlined the intention to begin the ADS-B ground station network in that year. More than 300 stations were up and running by the end of last year, with the balance of the eventual 700-plus stations forecast to be installed by early 2014.

Waas LPV progress was also encouraging, with 354 procedures published last year, making a total of almost 2,800 covering 1,400 airports now available. It’s estimated that 30 percent of the general aviation fleet is now equipped for LPVs–that is, with GPS plus Waas–but no estimates are available for ADS-B out, presumably because installations aren’t mandated until faraway 2020. (Not mentioned in the 2012 Plan were ADS-B out’s other distractions such as its debatable user benefits, plus the anticipated technology advances over the next eight years that could cut the price of ADS-B out and possibly make the infinitely more useful ADS-B in more affordable.)

Interestingly, too, the 2012 Plan describes the operational difference between the ADS-B out and in modes, showing the benefits of in during various flight phases, which previous plans hadn’t. The 2012 Plan emphasizes that performance-based navigation (PBN) capabilities will be an essential part of future NAS operations, and PBN procedures are now being issued almost routinely. Last year, 49 new GPS Rnav routes were published, including for the first time two helicopter routes between New York City and Washington. In addition, 51 RNP authorization required (AR) approach procedures–the most demanding procedures to design and obtain approval–were issued for use by qualified operators. PBN procedures are now well established in standard terminal arrival routes (Stars) with 288 incorporating optimized profile descents (OPDs), on which idle power is maintained from top of descent (TOD) to final approach.

READ MORE:   AINonline

The Declaration of Independence!

Experimental Remote Control QuadRotor with Machine Gun and a Crazy Operator

A different kind of Aircraft Briefing!  (SWA)