Modeling of Air Flow Over a Generic Aircraft Carrier With and Without Island Structure

The study of external aerodynamics of an aircraft carrier is of utmost importance in ensuring the safety of aircraft and pilots during take-off and recovery. The velocity deficit in the forward direction and the downwash together combine to give a sinking effect to the aircraft, along its glideslope path and is known as the ‘burble’ in naval aviation parlance. This phenomenon is primarily responsible for the potential increase in pilot workload on approach to the aircraft carrier. There is little literature in the open domain regarding ways and means to alleviate the burble effect. Unlike in the case of the automobile industry, which has the generic ‘Ahmed body’ and for the frigates/destroyers, for which there is the Simplified Frigate Ship (SFS), on which experiments and validation through CFD could be carried out, by researchers from all over the world, there is no generic Aircraft Carrier model for carrying out experiments and validation of CFD codes. The aim of this study is to define the Generic Aircraft Carrier Model (GAC), as developed at IIT Delhi, and to carry out numerical studies on the GAC and a variant of GAC without the island, BGAC (Baseline GAC), to assess the contribution of the island to the burble behind an Aircraft Carrier. This study gives a quantitative estimation of the effect and contribution of individual components of an Aircraft Carrier (like flight deck, island, etc.) to the burble behind the carrier, and would give a Naval Ship Designer an understanding of the effect of the geometrical configuration of the flight deck and the island on generation of the burble behind the carrier, which could aid the designer in potentially reducing the pilot workload.

Air-Wake Prediction Based Air-Vehicle Recovery Aids

This report demonstrates the capability of the forward prediction of the properties of the arriving wind at a vessel for time intervals adequate to significantly aid in the recovery of a wide range of air vehicles onto vessels. For craft with flight decks sited in the fore part of the vessel it is adequate to simply predict the arriving wind. For the more difficult task of recovery to stern areas behind superstructure it is also necessary to predict either the explicit properties of the turbulent air-wake or else to predict some quality measure for the aid of recovery under the prevailing conditions. The approach is able to relate the trends in the short-term statistical properties of fluctuating airflow over the flight deck to the trends in the predicted arriving wind.

Computational Analysis of Flight Deck Structural Behaviour under Variable Loadings

The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is subjected to various loads. In addition, the operation of fixed-wing aircraft presents unique structural requirements for the deck. This paper, therefore, compares the structural behaviour of a flight deck which was designed following the guidelines of three classification societies: Lloyd’s Register (LR), Det Norske Veritas Germanischer Lloyd (DNV), and Registro Italiano Navale (RINA). The loading scenarios considered in this work represent the operation of an F-35B Lightning jet from a Queen Elizabeth-class (QEC) aircraft carrier. A commercial finite element analysis (FEA) software ANSYS was also used to investigate the deflection, stress and strain on the deck plates. The analysis identified that only the calculated deck thickness values based on the LR regulations would meet the requirement for the class. This finding was further supported by the FEA.

An Examination of Pilot-Reported Trust and Response to Information Conflicts Experienced on the Flight Deck

The purpose of this study was to examine how pilots respond to conflicting information on the flight deck. In this study, 108 airline, corporate, and general aviation pilots completed an online questionnaire reporting weather, traffic, and navigation information conflicts experienced on the flight deck, including which information sources they trusted and acted on. Results indicated that weather information conflicts are most commonly experienced, and typically between a certified source in the panel and an uncertified electronic flight bag application. Most participants (a) trusted certified systems due to their accuracy, reliability, recency, and knowledge about the source, and (2) acted on the certified system due to trust, being trained and required to use it, and its indicating a more hazardous situation.

Noncompliance and Decision-Making of Airline Pilots: An Analysis of Narratives From the Aviation Safety Reporting System

The purpose of this study was to identify self-reported flight deck noncompliance in aviation safety reports and explore the relationship between adaptive expertise, deliberate vs. non-deliberate actions (errors), and intentional vs. unintentional noncompliance. The heuristics for assessing adaptive thinking and behavior were based on subscales of the Adaptive Expertise Survey (AES; Fisher & Peterson, 2001). We analyzed a random sample of 200 ASRS reports from 2019 and coded them with respect to (a) whether they described intentional or unintentional noncompliance by one or more flightcrew members, (b) whether the decision making was deliberate, and (c) whether the decision-making process involved correlates of adaptive or routine (non-adaptive) expertise. We found that unintentional noncompliance was associated most frequently with non-deliberate actions and non-adaptive behaviors. Adaptive behaviors were strongly associated with deliberate actions and intentional noncompliance. Our on-going research to investigate adaptive expertise and its relationship with predictors of noncompliance is discussed.

Situation Awareness Adaptive Alerting in an Aircraft Cockpit: A Simulator Study

The goal of this study was to develop an automated cockpit support system that is adaptive to the flight crew’s situation awareness (SA) estimated by online gaze analysis. Flight crew errors are often attributed to low SA. Online measurement of SA could be used to automatically guide the user’s attention for the sake of fewer errors and better performance.An eye-tracking based measure for SA was developed and used for the adaptive generation of alerts in a flight simulator. In an experiment, ten certified pilots conducted two trials with no and adaptive alerting. The experimental task involved tracking of flight parameters which were partially disturbed or changed at random times. Our online estimation of SA showed a strong correlation with observed pilot performance. With adaptive alerts, the average performance increased in those experimental tasks, where a situational change could not be predicted by participants. Also, adaptive alerts improved change detection and reduced the number of outliers, where a change was not noticed for an exceptionally long time. However, subjective rating was poor due to low transparency and false positives. SA-adaptive support can improve change detection performance in typical tasks on the flight deck. For a greater acceptance, pilots should be trained to understand the adaption policy.

New Interface To Cope With Unreliable Airspeed Indications: A Behavioral And Eye-Tracking Study.

When unreliable airspeed events occur, the pilot flying (PF) is required to fly the aircraft using the thrust and the pitch parameters that are displayed in two distanced locations of the flight deck. The Sycopaero interface was designed to limit the PF’s workload by automatically displaying thrust and pitch values specific to aircraft configuration on the Primary Flight Display. Participants performed a simulated flight scenario in which they lost airspeed information during take-off with and without the Sycopaero interface. Both behavioral and ocular results demonstrate that the Sycopaero interface significantly lowers PFs’ mental workload and improves their monitoring performance. Taken together, these results suggest that the Sycopaero interface may be an efficient solution in case of unreliable airspeed events.