Aeronautics and Aerospace UAS

In today’s aviation world, pilot jobs requirements are seeing a shift from manual flight to primarily crew resource management. Especially in the UAS industry, pilots are no longer mainly involved or primarily focused on keeping the aircraft in the air via manual controls but focusing on the mission and the tasks at hand to achieve the mission with the crew members collective responsibilities.     CRM skills are one of the most important factors for UAS operators. According to Ruff-Stahl et al. (2016), eliminating pilots entirely from an aircraft mission is highly inefficient due to the loss of CRM skills provided by pilots.   When it comes to size and capability of UAS requiring certain operator and training qualifications, the complexity of the UAS design needs to be taken into consideration. The Human Systems Integration (HSI) plays a big role in how the human interacts with system elements effecting performance and safety (Pagan, Astwood, & Phillips, 2015). There ...

     When examining aviation operations, both manned and unmanned, the risks and hazards do not stray that far from each other. The list of risks and hazards is quite extensive when including all possible general and/or specific risks present in the aviation industry. A few interconnected risks and hazards that exist for both manned and unmanned aviation alike include airspace separation, sustainable communications, as well as human factor issues. Airspace separation includes detect and avoid risks as well as integrations of new aircraft types into the NAS such as UAS and urban air mobility (UAM) technologies. The human factors may vary between the two aviation categories, but human factors in general will remain a constant issue. The more specific human factor hazards include human/ automation interaction which can involve active failures that can lead to accidents and a range of unsafe acts (Glussich & Histon, 2010). Additional risks and hazards include latent failu...

When discussing the interesting yet sensitive topic of automation in UAS, one must first understand that automation does not have to be an all or nothing approach. There are varying levels of automation that can be implemented in a system from minor to major with plenty of options in between. Diving into automation research, it can be devised that there are two categories of automation: static automation and adaptive automation.     Static automation is considered “hard-wired into the system” by way of the designer making the decisions as to whom or how a task should be performed (Marshall et al., 2011). In static UAS automation all decisions are made within the design of the system allowing for overriding of automation. Static automation could be called traditional automation. Adaptive automation is considered to be summoned by an operator event such as workload or situational event such as takeoff speed (Marshall et al., 2011).   As previously mentioned about autonomy n...

When considering taking medications in an aviation protocols in place, there are several determining factors that are involved to decide whether or not a mission should be flown. Manned aircraft pilots as well as UAS pilots experience similar limitations and cautions as it pertains to medications because the risks are great if not taken seriously. There are many physiological factors that affect pilot performance and those can include stress, fatigue, and drugs consumption. Anything that limits the pilot’s faculties and decision-making skills is considered detrimental to operations.    When examining UAS pilot’s levels of decision-making requirements, complexity in tasks, and skill set necessary to perform missions, one could argue that the over-the-counter OTC medications that pose the most significant risk to UAS pilots would be antihistamines and/or decongestants due to their potential to cause cognitive deficits. Now I will argue that decongestants are on the approved list...