Aerospace Systems Technical Group

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  • 1.  March ‘25

    Posted 03-23-2025 13:28

    March 8th was the International Women's Day and Women In Aviation (WIA) listed the 100 most influential women in the aviation and aerospace industry. It looks back at the past 100 years to highlight pioneers, policy-makers, test pilots, astronauts and military personnel that shaped our industry. Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly across the Atlantic solo in 1932, is featured on this month’s newsletter. You can read her One Life profile by the Smithsonian to remember her accomplishments.

    ASPIRE 2025 Conference

    The next HFES conference will be held in Chicago, IL on October 13 - 17, 2025. 

    Aerospace Systems TG received a number of promising submissions that are presently being peer-reviewed. This will offer constructive feedback to authors to improve their submission. This year, the conference follows a 2-stage process: 1) extended abstracts are reviewed for acceptance or rejection; 2) then accepted submissions can be turned into full papers that will also be peer-reviewed for their publication in the proceedings.

     

    Here is the calendar with important dates that will bring us to the conference:

    • February 13th Abstract submission due

    • April 3 - Peer review of abstracts due

    • April 14 - Acceptance decision sent to authors

    • May 5 - Full paper due

    • May 21 - Peer review of full paper due

    • June 17 - Camera-ready paper due

    • July 1 - Session chair assignments

    • October 13-17 - Conference in Chicago

     

    Thank you to the authors and reviewers for advancing science in aviation, space traffic management and advanced mobility!

    Want to help ASTG?

     

    We warmly invite all members of the Aerospace Systems TG (ASTG) to become more involved in our dynamic and supportive community. Have you recently been part of an exciting research project? Or have you read a research paper that caught your attention and you want to share it to others? We'd love to hear about it! You can submit a research highlight, that is a 200-500 word explanation of your recent work. Your contributions will be featured in our newsletter, giving you a wonderful opportunity to showcase your achievements and inspire your peers.

    We are also looking for help to write about recent news events related to space and student activities. This will be shared on the ASTG LinkedIn account and “In the News” section at the end of the newsletter. 

    Drop us a line hfesaerospacesystems@gmail.com or email one of the TG officers (our emails are public 🙈) https://www.hfes.org/Groups-Communities/Technical-Groups/Aerospace-Systems

    Your participation is invaluable to the growth and success of ASTG, and we can't wait to see the amazing things we can accomplish together!

     

    New Publications

    By Philippe Doyon-Poulin

     

    2D versus 3D aviation weather visualisations
    By Adrian Sarbach, Tiffany C.K. Kwok,Peter Kiefer & Martin Raubal
    24 commercial pilots tested three weather displays: 2D top-down (conventional), 3D exocentric, 3D egocentric. The authors found that the 2D planar map view resulted in the highest SA compared to 3D weather visualisations

    Creating augmented reality-based experiences for aviation weather training: Challenges, opportunities, and design implications for 3D authoring
    By Jiwon Kim, Kexin Wang, Michael Dorneich, Eliot Winer, Lori Brown & Geoffrey Whitehurst
    Still on the topic of weather representation in aviation, this study interviewed 17 aircraft instructors to understand their needs to create lessons using augmented reality (AR). The paper also presents opportunities for easy-to-use AR authoring tools in aviation.

     

    The Effect of Personality Traits and Flight Experience on Pilots’ Cognitive and Affective Responses to Simulated In-Flight Hazards
    By Jiayu Chen, Annemarie Landman, Olaf Stroosma, M. M. van Paassen, and Max Mulder
    The research team looked back at previous data they collected over 4 studies with 89 pilots to find if personality traits impact the pilot’s response to startling and unexpected scenarios. Trait anxiety was the only factor found to be significantly positively correlated with stress.

     

    Cognitive Incapacitation in Aviation: A Narrative Review
    By Mickaël Causse, Jonathan Denielb, Flora Schwartz, Alexandre Duchevet, Nadine Matton, Jean-Paul Imbert & Julien Cegarra
    This literature review focuses on pilot’s cognitive incapacity that is less studied than medical incapacitation. It presents the main causes and consequences of cognitive incapacitation applied in the aviation context and physiological measures to detect its occurrence.

     

    Enabling Civil Single-Pilot Operations: A State-of-the-Art Review
    Nicola Puca & Giorgio Guglieri
    This literature review updates previous work on Single Pilot Operations (SPO) done by Schmid and Stanton, Harris and Wang et al. It also presents recent development in pilot assistive technologies and automation support.

     

    Eye-tracking analysis to assess the mental load of unmanned aerial system operators: systematic review and future directions
    By A.C. Russo, M.M. Cardoso Junior and E. Villani

     

    Comparative analysis of touchscreen inceptors and traditional sidesticks on flight decks: flight performance, visual behaviours and situation awareness
    By Yifan Wang,Wojciech Tomasz Korek,James Blundell & Wen-Chin Li

     

    (Preprint) AdaptiveCoPilot: Design and Testing of a NeuroAdaptive LLM Cockpit Guidance System in both Novice and Expert Pilots
    By Shaoyue Wen et al.

     

    Research Spotlight - Public Acceptance of Advanced Airspace Mobility

    By Nick Tepylo

     

    In 2022, Dr. Nick Tepylo, formerly of Carleton University began research into public perception of advanced air mobility. Funded by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, his team developed a survey that was distributed to the canadian population to try and understand their level of awareness about drones, uncrewed aerial systems, and urban air mobility. They received over 1000 responses from the demographically representative sample which revealed several key findings. First, the term “drone” is far more recognized and is viewed more favorably than other terms such as “unmanned aerial vehicle”. When looking at an individual’s emotional response to drones and UAVs, they found that men view drones with positive feelings, whereas women are more neutral; however, with UAVs, men expressed mostly positive and neutral feelings while women showed concern.

    One of the main questions in the survey asked participants if they supported drones and UAVs in all cases, were opposed in all cases, or their support/opposition was conditional on factors such as the operator, the purpose of the flight, the weather, etc. Overall, 74.1% of individuals stated that their support or opposition was conditional and based on the specific circumstances, with another 18.8% indicating support regardless of the conditions and 7.1% opposing in all cases. The next series of questions presented various applications of drones such as search and rescue, agriculture, surveillance, and package delivery. The most supported mission, search and rescue, received 87.7% support, 1.6% opposition, and 10.7% remaining neutral. When comparing the two questions, the level of opposition for search and rescue missions was far below the percentage that said they oppose the use of drones in all cases, indicating that many individuals are unaware of how drones can be used. As for the other applications, package delivery had the lowest level of support with 44.9% in favor, 25.7% opposed, and 29.4% neither supporting nor opposing this mission type. One surprising finding was that older individuals are more supportive of drones when their use case is explained in comparison with younger individuals. This finding and others contained in the article suggest that educating the public is the key to widespread acceptance. The team also demonstrated that recruitment methods are important and that surveys which are not demographically representative can contain biased samples.

    Their most recent article asked individuals if they were willing to fly on urban air mobility aircraft, finding that 39.4% of their Canadian sample were happy to do so, with another 29.1% indicating maybe. A follow-up question clarified that they could fly with a pilot and/or flight attendant on board and presented a scenario where individuals could fly with their friends or fly alone. This question demonstrated the value of trust as 66.5% of those surveyed indicated they were willing to fly onboard a fully autonomous aircraft if people they knew were also on board. This is the highest known willingness to fly on an autonomous aircraft globally. 

    In the News

    Aviation

    • Universal Avionics unveils a new taxi assistance feature. It fuses data from a video feed with ABS-B to highlight traffic position on the screen. More interestingly, it uses speech-to-text features to convert tower instructions into step-by-step instructions for surface navigation, and it checks that pilot’s readback is correct. Although such features have been researched in the past, it’s always nice to see this work make its way into a commercial product.

     

    Electric

    • The knowns and unknowns of eVTOL downwash. The Federal Aviation Administration's Engineering Brief (EB) 105A presents the idea of a downwash caution zone, which is an operational area where the movement of people and vehicles is regulated during aircraft operations. Initially created to address concerns about the downwash and outwash effects of eVTOL aircraft, this guideline will also be applicable to helicopters in the future. The Air Current has removed its paywall on its feature coverage on the topics to let everyone be up to speed on this upcoming topic.

    • Archer Aviation’s flight school has received FAA Part 141 certificate to begin training and certifying commercial pilots. The flight school will initially use a Bell 206 JetRanger for its first class in late 2025. Training on Archer Midnight eVTOL will occur later, once the FAA grants its type inspection certification. Joby Aviation received its Part 141 certificate back in December ‘24.

    • More information is being shared regarding the upcoming vertiports at Abu Dhabi. Skyports relieved its proposed design that will include both passengers and cargo logistics. EVTOL air taxi service is expected to begin in Abu Dhabi by the end of this year. This follows the development reported in our last newsletter regarding the Dubai vertiport working in tandem with Joby.

     

    Space

    • An investigation conducted by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) examined how the brain adapts to space and readjusts to normal gravity using various assessments, including neuroimaging. Researchers suggest that previous data could be reanalyzed due to errors identified in their study, which found that an upward shift in the brain during spaceflight makes it difficult to distinguish different types of tissue, leading to errors in determining brain volume changes. This discovery implies that unique methods are necessary to analyze astronaut brain structure accurately.



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