Aerospace Systems Technical Group

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  • 1.  ASPIRE '24 Highlights

    Posted 09-25-2024 20:17

    HFES ASPIRE ‘24 was a busy event for the Aerospace Systems TG, with 15 lectures, 2 discussion panels, 10 posters, and overall large attendance. This newsletter summarizes the main highlights for our members to catch up on everything that happened in Phoenix.

    Read this newsletter online to see higher-resolution pictures

    Proceedings

    This year, articles are published as free access on a roll-out basis on the Sage website. This is a major improvement compared to previous years and offers a much easier access to papers. Once all articles are received and formatted, they will be published in the official conference proceedings. You can consult the conference program to help you find papers from the Aerospace Systems track.

    Note that this year the acceptance rate of papers was 50%.

    Read the conference proceedings

    Best Paper Awards

    ASTG offered two best paper awards during the conference: one for best student paper and another for overall best paper. The selection was based on the reviewers’ ratings during the peer-review and handed to the paper with the highest score from student work and non-student work. Congratulations to the winners!

    Best Student Paper

    John Hayes from Texas A&M University received the Best Student Paper Award, handed by Katie Sabo the session co-chair. Co-authors to this study are Ranjana Mehta, Kieran Nichols, PhD and Jeevan Jayasuriya from University of Wisconsin-Madison and Blake Fairchild also from Texas A&M University.

    In their work, John and his colleagues investigated the sensorimotor impairments associated with fatigue and G-transitions as experienced by astronauts during and after spaceflight. Past work suggested that fatigue would lead to decreased human performance. Surprisingly, the authors found that participants improved their performance following the fatigue-induction task, but only during eyes-open conditions, suggesting that vision plays a critical role in the adaptation to vestibular impairment under fatigue.

    Overall Best Paper

    Barrett Caldwell from Purdue University received the Best Paper Award, handed by Arjun H. Rao, program technical chair. Co-authors of the paper are Michael Splitt from Florida Institute of Technology and Abigail Boerwinkle from Purdue University.
    In their work, the authors investigated to what extent general aviation pilots can estimate the current flying conditions (VFR, MFR, IFR) at a specific location based on the weather reports at neighboring sites. They found that pilots rarely provided correct estimations of flight rule conditions at targeted locations, even when increasing the density of reports at neighboring sites. Despite these errors, pilots were confident in their estimates of flight rule conditions at target locations. Also of note is that all pilots who participated were familiar with the areas surveyed in the study.

    Student Travel Grant

    This year, ASTG offered 4 student travel grants to:

    The $500 travel grant was offered to the first author of a student work presented at ASPIRE '24. We hope this initiative will support more students to attend the event in the future. Congratulations to the recipients!

     

    Discussion Panel - Promises of Urban Air Mobility

    Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is set to change our industry in the coming years. The first discussion panel chaired by Kim-Phuong Vu brought together five panelists from industry, academia, and government agencies to discuss the state of UAM today and what it will take to make UAM a reality. They addressed how the development of the major components of the UAM system should evolve over time.

    Read the summary of the panel

    Discussion Panel - Young and Diverse Voices in Aviation Human Factors

    In this second panel, Beth Blickensderfer invited four young professionals working in aviation human factors to share their personal path into the fields and highlight the diverse opportunities our discipline has to offer. Panelists shared a trove of suggestions on what worked best for them to join the industry. You can read our summary of the exchange online.

    Read the summary of this discussion

    Fun facts

    • The opening plenary session included a breath-taking performance by Joe Castillo, who draws live using volcano sand. Watch the recording.
    • At the end of his lecture on factors affecting pilot’s response time, Dennis Beringer, recent FAA retiree and HFES Fellow, shared a lovely update on his 6 grandchildren much to the delight of the audience.
    • Waymo automated taxis are active in Phoenix and triggered their fair share of discussion on human factors issues related to automated driving.

    ASTG Executive Committee

    While at the conference, the ASTG Executive Committee took part to HFES working groups to improve our members’ experience:

    • Amanda Harwood and Arjun Rao attended the council of technical groups. The meeting was where chairs of the different TGs met to discuss topics relevant to the society, including initiatives and lessons learned on membership engagement and efficacy of the new review and bidding process.

    • Philippe Doyon-Poulin attended the TG program chair meeting. TG chairs shared their feedback on what to improve in the submission and review cycle for next year. We can already expect the submission to be a 2-page extended abstract, offering more flexibility on section length, pictures and equations. If you want to share your feedback on the submission and review cycle, you can write to Philippe or contact Farzan Sasangohar directly.

    We hope you enjoyed the conference as much as we did! We would love having your feedback on what you liked and what could be improved for next year, so please contact us to let us know.

    – Your ASTG executive committee



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