Evacuation modeling
It is standard knowledge in the aviation community that if passengers can evacuate a crashed aircraft within 90 seconds they stand a very good chance of survival. A recent crash of Comair 5191 at Lexington no passengers escaped despite the aircraft being almost intact. Delta have recently moved from the 2 5 2 seat layout to 3 3 3 doubling the number of passengers in a 'middle seat'. The research will involve building a model of evacuation from various aircraft types and using randomized variant passenger types and passenger injuries, calculate the median evacuation time and carry out a sensitivity analysis to identify issues that have large effects on evacuation.
Contrails and Radiative Forcing
Recent research in Nature, claimed results showed that contrails contribute to radiative forcing, particularly at night, as during the day the forcing is balanced by reflection of incident sunlight. The experimenters used sensors that were under the air routes to the west of London Heathrow so there were always aircraft in the volume of airspace that they were recording. Contrails only appear if the mixing level of the water vapor in the air is high and they become persistent when the air is supersaturated. Water vapor itself is responsible for significant radiative forcing. The experiment reported in Nature did not repeat a control experiment where the mixing levels / relative humidities and temperatures were the same but there were no contrails. In this research identify at least 2 sensing stations which are climatologically similar if not identical but one below a regularly flown area and one away from flight paths. Compare the radiative forcing of the air above both sensors when the mixing ratios are and temperatures and gradients are the same in both but one has persistent contrails. This should allow the effect of the contrails to be isolated. Generate a formal report of the effect of contrails normalized for water vapour content and temperatures.
Multiple UAVs - One UAS Operator - Human Factors
Working with a real time human in the loop simulation of Central Florida Airspace with normal traffic with embedded UAVs, run simulations which involve a UAV operator controlling several UAVs and a busy sector with one controller. Use Human Factors metrics SWAT, TLX and ISA and PUMA. Compare and contrast the outputs from the metrics tools. Identify the peak levels of taskload and workload of the UAS operator and the controller.
ADS-B Situational Awareness, Self-Separation and Attention
The aircraft on the flight line have been fitted with ADS-B displays that show traffic in their area. The JPDO and NGATS Institute are putting forward concepts of operation that extend the traffic information use of these displays to allowing aircraft to subsume the task of the radar controller and carry out self separation from each other and from the controlled aircraft. Run a real time simulation using aircraft simulators and the ATC real time simulator. The simulation run should be conventional radar control; the second run to be all self separating aircraft. Identify how much attention is lost to flying the aircraft by pilots carrying out, situational awareness, then self separation. Analyse the flight paths of the aircraft, list any losses of separation and quantify the cost benefits if these systems were used in real life. Identify the most cost effective system from a system viewpoint and from an operator viewpoint.
Airborne Separation Assurance in a High Density Weather Exception Environment
Repeat the experiment at 4 above but in this simulation use up to 40 'pilots'. Split the pilots into 5 airline teams that can brief together before the simulation runs. Set up a real time human in the loop simulation of aircraft approaching an airport TRACON corner posts to join a landing sequence. Each Corner Post fix has a capacity of 15 per hour and the simulation is set up for 10 per hour aircraft to each fix. Run a baseline simulation with a controller sequencing the aircraft to the fixes then rerun the same simulation but with no controller just self separating aircraft. Repeat both of the first simulations but in these runs include a weather exception that reduces the airport approach capacity to 50% of the number of aircraft and which closes 2 of the Corner Post Fixes. (This means the corner post capacity is now reduced to 30 aircraft per hour and the landing capacity to 20 aircraft per hour.) Compare the performance of the controlled system with the self separating system. Carry out a human factors analysis of the pilots for loss of attention to flying the aircraft; check for losses of separation, and efficiency and cost effectiveness of the system as a whole.