Single Pilot Operations (SPO)

Although air traffic is expected to increase substantially over the next few years, the aviation industry lacks the necessary experienced pilot workforce to be able to take on such high loads of commercial transportation. Single pilot operations (SPO) is an alternative solution to this looming epidemic, suggesting that it is possible to reduce cockpit crew while maintaining or increasing situation awareness, and reducing workload. While this notion may seem out of reach, Koltz et al. (2015) conducted a preliminary study in which harbor pilots (remote co-pilots operating from a ground station) reported exactly that—more situation awareness and less workload.

Since the advent of commercial aviation, cockpit crews have decreased from five people to today’s two pilot crew. Granted that reducing cockpit crew is not a new notion, there is lacking research in exploring the possibilities of a single pilot crew. More data must be collected that explores the possibility of having a single pilot crew with a co-pilot on the ground. Since the aviation industry consists of many complicated moving parts, it is important to involve subject matter experts in the design of these experiments as much as possible. For example, O’Connor et al. (2011) used real-life scenarios such as landing at Denver International airport, and asked commercial pilot subject matter experts to perform a cognitive walkthrough to identify critical events within the scenario. These preliminary studies provide a good foundation for SPO research; however, more studies must be conducted to further investigate the impacts of reduced crew operations.

References

Koltz, T., M., Roberts., S., Z., Sweet, J., Battiste, H., Cunningham, J., Battiste, V., Vu, K., P., L., Strybel, Z., T. (2015). An investigation of the harbor pilot concept for single pilot operations. In 6th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE 2015) and the Affiliated Conferences (pp. page numbers), Publisher: Place of Publication. doi: 10.1016/j.promfg.2015.07.948

O’Connor, R., Roberts, Z., Ziccardi, J., Koteskey, R., Lachter, J., Dao, Q., Johnson, W., Battiste, V., Vu, K.-P. L., & Strybel, T. Z. (2013). Pre-study walkthrough with a commercial pilot for a preliminary single pilot operations experiment.Human Interface and the Management of Information. Information and Interaction for Health, Safety, Mobility and Complex Environments Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume Number, 136-142, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-39215-3_17