Remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs) provide highly effective capabilities – long loiter time, detailed sensing from great distance and an expendable platform. RPAs actively support military operations, homeland defense, firefighting, search and rescue operations, geophysical surveys, and commercial surveillance. Research is ongoing to maximize the utilization of existing assets in current and futu...

The aerospace environment is a dynamic interaction between man, machine and the environment. Skin diseases are not particularly significant aeromedically, yet they could permanently affect an aviator's status for continued flying duty. A number of dermatological conditions lend themselves to flying restrictions for the aviator. Aircrew and ground crew are exposed to a myriad of elements that co...

The principal impact on the crew of improved technology on the flight deck has been a reduction in the number of tasks that the crew must perform but an increase in the amount of information that must be monitored. Under such circumstances it is difficult to determine the extent of the pilot's workload, yet its assessment is crucial in deciding how many people are required to operate a given ai...

Helicopter operations imply Whole-Body Vibration (WBV), primarily due to the motions of the main rotor system. Health effects of WBV in general have primarily been related to the spine and it's related structures. However, many other effects are present, some of them having potential health implications while others may affect safety by acting on the human operator's physiology. METHODS AND DIS...

To fulfil the various tasks and roles efficiently in the Royal Air Force good health is implicit but 'fitness' is not so specifically defined. Fitness relates to a task; it does not describe a state of health. Using a system of submaximal measurement of oxygen uptake (VO2), skinfold thickness, weight and health parameters involving an actuarial scaled questionnaire and blood pressure measuremen...

The thermal strain imposed on helicopter aircrew by chemical protective (NBC) clothing in summer in Germany has been assessed in a laboratory simulation. The environmental conditions used were dry bulb temperature 35 degrees C, wet bulb temperature 19 degrees C and a wind speed of 2.0 m X s-1. The NBC equipment imposed a significant thermal strain on the crewman when compared with standard summ...

Attaining a realistic, high fidelity distributed virtual environment for next generation aircrew training requires that air operations, command and control, and logistics activities be correctly simulated for both the manned and computer-controlled actors. Computer-generated actors are especially important to the attainment of these next generation capabilities since they will be the opponents ...

Approximately eight percent of human males (and a fraction of one percent of females) in a given population of aircrew training applicants will have some degree of color insensitivity: that is, be unable to discriminate between certain shades of a color and white, or, between shades of colors, or even between certain colors. The insensitivity may range from mild to complete, and should not, in ...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of increasing mental demands on various aspects of aircrew performance. In particular, the robustness of the prioritization and allocation hierarchy of aviate-navigate-communicate was examined, a hierarchy commonly used within the aviation industry. A total of 42 trainee pilots were divided into three workload groups (low, medium, high) t...

A series of recent studies on automation bias, the use of automation as a heuristic replacement for vigilant information seeking and processing, has investigated omission and commission errors in highly automated decision environments. Most of the research on this phenomenon has been conducted in a single-person performance configuration. This study was designed to follow up on that research to...