Crew State Monitoring and Line-Oriented Flight Training for Attention Management

Loss of control –inflight (LOC-I) has historically represented the largest category of commercial aviation fatal accidents. A review of worldwide transport airplane accidents (2001-2010) indicated that loss of airplane state awareness (ASA) was responsible for the majority of the LOC-I fatality rate. The Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST) ASA study identified12 major themes that were indicated across the ASA accident and incident events. One of the themes was crew distractionorineffective attention management, which was found to be involved in all 18 events including flight crew channelized attention, startle/surprise, diverted attention, and/or confirmation bias. Safety Enhancement(SE)-211, “Training for Attention Management” was formed to conduct research to develop and assess commercial airline training methods and realistic scenarios that can address these attention-related human performance limitations. This paper describes NASA SE-211 research for new design approaches and validation of line-oriented flight training (LOFT).