BACKGROUND The U.S. Air Force (USAF) active duty and civilian populations experience a substantial number of lost-workday injuries while lifting, handling, and carrying objects. Back injuries are most frequently reported. PURPOSE The purpose of this study is to describe the hazard scenarios of lift-handle-carry injuries to better identify effective countermeasures. METHODS The data were der...

A flight research program exploring the practical application of real-time performance optimization based on aircraft measurements and calculation of incremental drag from forced-response maneuvers is presented. The outboard ailerons of the L-1011 test bed aircraft were modified to provide for symmetric deflections to permit a recambering of the wing in that localized area, which in turn modifi...

This paper reviews recent trends in control of aircraft, rail and highway vehicles toward supervisory control. Supervisory control means the human operator intermittently specifies goals, constraints and procedural information to a computer, monitors synoptic displays of state information, and tasks the computer to execute the instructions automatically. This trend has been driven by new sensor...

In the African scenario, slow-moving airborne platforms such as transport aircraft have in recent years come up against a wide variety of threats, including several generations of man-portable surface to air missile systems (MANPADS or SAMS). With South Africa's role in the AU and NEPAD it has been widely accepted that support for UN-Sanctioned missions such as regional peacekeeping efforts, el...

Background A military aircraft in a hostile environment may need to use radar jamming in order to avoid being detected or engaged by the enemy. Effective jamming can require knowledge of the number and type of enemy radars; however, the radar receiver on the aircraft will observe a single stream of pulses from all radar emitters combined. It is advantageous to separate this collection of pulses...

A multi-organizational effort led by the Air Force Research Laboratory conducted acoustic emissions measurements on the F-35A and F-35B aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base, California in September 2013. These measurements followed American National Standards Institute/Acoustical Society of America S12.75-2012 to collect noise data to support community noise modeling and ground personnel noise ex...

Human error has been implicated in almost 70-80% of civil and military aviation accidents. It appears that attempts to understand human factors in aircraft accidents and apply remedial strategies have been made in isolation in addressing a particular link in the whole process of aircraft accident prevention. The suggested holistic approach to minimize aircraft accidents, aims to provide a compo...

Development of High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) aircraft systems is part of a vision for a low cost communications/surveillance capability. Applications of a multi payload aircraft operating for extended periods at stratospheric altitudes span military and civil genres and support battlefield operations, communications, atmospheric or agricultural monitoring, surveillance, and other discipli...

This paper presents a novel Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Avionics Based Integrity Augmentation (ABIA) system architecture suitable for civil and military air platforms, including Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). Taking the move from previous research on high-accuracy Differential GNSS (DGNSS) systems design, integration and experimental flight test activities conducted at the Itali...

G-induced loss of consciousness (G-LOC) is a pilot human factors (HF) problem that plagues all air forces that fly high performance fighter aircraft. Spatial disorientation (SD) is an even more serious HF problem that affects not only the military but also commercial aviation. By some estimates, one out of every four aircraft mishaps is due to a HF problem, and the pilot flies a perfectly opera...