Welcome to the Air Line Pilot Podcast. I'm Jason Ambrosi. As the largest non governmental aviation safety organization, ALPA keeps close ties to our partners in safety across the industry. Today we're joined by one of those partners, Akbar Sultan, the director of NASA, airspace operations and safety program. This program plays a key role in researching and identifying safety threats and opportunities. Thank you for joining us, Akbar.
Thank you, Captain Ambrosi, for having us today here.
Absolutely. Before we jump into the meat and potatoes, I'll say I come from largely the industrial side of ALPA. However, our roots are in safety since our beginning in 1931. And it's been great seeing firsthand the incredible work our volunteers and staff do On the safety front every day. And I'm excited to communicate these efforts on behalf of our listeners. So NASA and FAA have been great partners for decades and mitigating risk in aviation through the commercial aviation
safety team or cast. Would you give our listeners a bit of background on the work and some of the developments and processes NASA has helped to build?
Certainly, so first of all, um, you know, NASA has a very long and rich history in aviation. I mean, we go back to 1915, when there was a for it originally, NACA was established the National Advisory Council and aeronautics. And you go in what we say today is, NASA is in the DNA of aviation. So when you fly, whether it's a ground based system, or an avionics system or an aircraft, you know, system or engine, you won't necessarily see a NASA logo on something. But if we've had our our hands
on it, somewhere down the line, as aviation has evolved. So for example, if we look at some of the big advancements in the for example, in the 1970s, we helped promote, and spearhead Crew Resource Management, which had a big change on how we fly aircraft today, and how we make decisions in the cockpit. In the 1980s, we helped develop the enhanced vision systems and synthetic visions and for operations in low visibility
conditions. And of course, as we look, you know, closer in more recently, after the unfortunate Colgan air accident, we actually led six safety enhancements under the commercial aviation safety team for prevention of stall in helping with Upset Recovery, which essentially was if you look at the simulators, that were used for stall recovery operations, the earlier models were very much linear models, which said you know, the plane is flying steady, and then there is an issue it says your
installed but however, the simulator was so perfectly flyable it did not have that mushy feel, or the controls were for example, not reversed, it could not emulate a proper style properly. So we enhance those algorithms. So that now a pilot can truly experience in the simulated environment, what it feels like, such that when you know, should they unfortunately have that encounter, they have a better muscle memory on how to
react to it. So that technology has been now transferred to all the aviation community for us, as well as being able to enhance the algorithms to train them for Upset Recovery conditions. I am for example, I used to sail long time ago. And if you're a sailor, you can know that sometimes you you stall your rudder, right? You need to reverse the rudders in order to reattach the flow. And that same thing happens with absolute recovery conditions. So, these are some of the main things that
we have helped develop. And if you look at CAST, you know, it was formed in the 90s. In in, in the in that same timeframe. NASA led the effort to show that using data analytics, you can try to go into more proactive safety environment to be able to identify some things, precursors to accidents or incidents, or to identify trends. And that capability very much resulted in the creation of Assayas in the early 2000s. So as you can see, you know, we we don't necessarily have an ownership of
something. However, as aviation has evolved, we've had significant contributions throughout certain timeframes.
Yeah, that's that's incredible. And it's it's it's It's amazing to see the work that so many different organizations do together to keep that level of safety getting better, right? If at any point in our history, we said, Okay, we're safe enough now, as the system get bigger and bigger, there'd be you know, numbers of, of accidents, that
would be never acceptable. So the fact that your organization organization, so many other organizations strive to have an increased level of safety, and even now that we're in the safest period in history, keep pushing that that bar higher and push that bar forward. But so what are you working on, or researching now to mitigate risk?
So our primary focus right now is on this concept called an entire Aviation Safety Management System, which is, how do you go from the current environment of our reactive and proactive environment to a more predictive environment? And using data analytics, and automation to do monitor alert and mitigation of safety events and looking for us precursors? So that's in the early stages of the research that we're currently kind of doing a lot of work on
the notice at work? What what did you just explain that a little more, if
you don't mind? Certainly. So for example, you know, I might give one example is is looking at Mr approaches. So for example, if using data analytics, and everything that's ongoing on in the flight data recorder, and using those telemetry data, and looking at the state of the NASS in their region, and looking at what all the other aircraft have done, winds, whether the state of the pilot, how many hours they have had on onboard, and, you know, what is their state of
alertness, everything else that's going on. So a tremendous
amount of data analytics can be at play. And being able to look at that and the aircraft state and say, before the pilots are able to actually make a decision for a go, no, go on a go around, having the algorithm be able to say, you know, almost 30 seconds, and sometimes up to a minute before stating that, given the current aircraft state, and the approach path, and everything else that's going on in an ass, you know, maybe you should do a go around at this higher altitude, higher
energy state. So this is kind of like an algorithm that we've been able to research in the lab environment, of course, but this is something that can have application in the real world. So this is now getting into that more predictive automation environment, being able to assist the crew in in being able to essentially have automation, you know, do this human machine or automation teaming. Because at the end of the day, you human
is fully responsible for the vehicle safety. So how do we add additional enhancements and capability for that decision making?
Identify the risk earlier I see is what it sounds like. What other trends have you as your office recently identified or, or areas in which we we could do something to improve, improve safety beyond where we are today?
That we've looked at a couple of things. So first, of course, you know, runway incursions, and in wrong surface approaches, and those things, I know have been making a lot of headline news. We know NASA has developed a capability that using ATSB, in which unfortunately is not widely
deployed, right. But if aircraft that are ATSB, in equipped, you could provide the crew some additional alerts and information in the cockpit, both for aircraft on the ground as well as on the approach in order to be able to avoid runway incursions, or wrong surface approaches. This is a capability that one can look at it from two sides. One is say, you know, of course, it enhances safety. But from the other perspective, I know where the airlines in having to equip, there's always
that first question they always ask, right? Well, you have this new technology dsbn Why should I invest in it? So this way, we are able to now say that, okay, if if you were to invest in this technology, now, this is a reward that perhaps you could, you could get out of that equipage so that's a return on investment. So that's, that's one of the things for example, that we've been looking at. That seems
like a simple one. If I might not say so II ADSB. And that it's just seems like common sense because it gives you more situational awareness as a pilot. Situational Awareness is is it's great. So just like you said, runway incursions or you know, wrong, wrong approaches. Just having that situational awareness. It seems like a no brainer that that would be an investment that that Errol lines and industry would want to make.
Absolutely. But as you can see, I mean, you're a pilot, there's a huge cost and airlines are they're not the high margin endeavors. So this is where what we tried to do is we just because of that, we try to create capabilities in technologies that can piggyback off of tech investments, such as at ESPN. So this way, for example, we can say like, Okay, if you do invest in ESPN, what additional capability enhancement could I provide you? So the safety is an example.
We've developed a couple of additional tools, for example, to reduce noise emissions and fuel that's actually in demonstrations out in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Dallas love field with a few airlines that are saving tremendous amount of fuel, for example, with what a few of our airline partners out there.
Yeah, yeah, that's, that's great. Going way back, NASA's ASR is Aviation Safety Reporting System, and you know, other confidential safety reporting systems like ASAP, when, okay, at the airline level that most airlines have, have implemented our vital tools in understanding the trends of safety? How does NASA and other groups utilize this information provided by you know, actual line pilots out there in this environment? And when what value does that contribute to the, to the research projects?
So, so first of all, you know, if we look at some systems, such as ASRS, it's a lack of better word, it's a wealth of information, where you can get almost like approaching almost 1000 reports a month, for example, that that are received within that system. And of course, you can also even supplemented with as a science, which has additional information
on data fusion, for example, as well. And you heard me talk a little bit, you know, a few moments ago, talk about automation, using automation to help monitor or alert and mitigate potential safety hazard. So for these algorithms, they need a lot of data, in order to sort of normalize to say, what is a safe event? And how do you now look for that
outlier. So in order to in order to make sure that we are able to detect that potential outlier correctly, because at the end of the day, you don't want to have too many false positives, right? False negatives, I'm sorry. So so so this is where, where this tremendous amount of data is extremely crucial for us, we're able to use that data and mine it and then help train the algorithms to make sure that we're not missing anything. So those are like the false negatives that you perhaps you
missed, something that you should have flagged. And or we're not having too many false positives, where we flagging a lot of things that should not be flagged. Because at the end of the day, you want the human that's using the system to have trust in the system. Now, if you have false positives and negatives, that trust, of course, is lost on automation.
And that's the worst situation one can have in a knavish environment where the the human and machine that connect connectivity is now for example, has been compromised.
That's interesting. You know, we talk about the line pilots perspective, what what is the important of the line pilot perspective from you know, our ALPA representatives, and when we work with government or or industry workgroups like yours.
So, you know, to put it simply, line pilots are domain experts. You all know as to why something should be done the way it is, or why something happened the way it happened. And having that crucial information is tremendous. And also, at the end of the day, what technology needs to be developed to be helpful to you. Because if NASA develops our technologies, and we do it in a vacuum, we will maybe develop a very wonderful tool that works perfectly fine in a lab
environment. However, perhaps it is not implementable and deployable because it's, it's going to be arduous to deploy in a real world environment. So that's why we try to engage with the end users as early in the research phase as possible. We actually try to engage with our users almost at TRL, one at very
low maturity levels. So that we may have a concept, but how do we shape the concept such that at the end of the day, it's useful to the to the to the to the to the actual deployed entity, and also get that feedback to say, you know, this is how you should perhaps evolve haven't changed the concept. And
this is what's useful information for me. You know, going back to what I said a moment ago in terms of those eight data and data analytics, you know, providing additional data to a user is not necessarily helpful because at the end of the day data is not necessarily information. Data needs to be translated in a form that is useful and digestible by the end user. And this is the tremendous feedback we get from the from the aviation community.
I can say as a lion pilot, you know of doing this now that many years of flying out there I appreciate when when our perspective is listened to because we like you said we're in that environment day in and day out, day and night. Now shifting gears a little bit to do all the new entrance we have so many new entrance, it's going to be a clogged Naseer, before too long, how will the air transportation system need to adapt to to keep such a safe operating environment?
Well, aviation is changing tremendously. And with especially with the advent of new entrants, because if you look at the new entrants, it's going to bring far more set of, you know, the diversity of operations is going to be higher. Because if we look at the current aviation, it's you know, Toobin wings, right, and a few rotorcraft throw in a few GA throwing. And the modes of sources and sink of operations are primarily airport to airport or verta, part two of our
report. However, with new entrants, you can sort of see that the performance characteristics of just these vehicles is going to be far more diverse, you know, you could have for example, if you're looking at the Upper East atmosphere, you could have a supersonic aircraft surance, you know, going through an airspace at Mach 1.5, occupied by a hail that's going at 15 knots, right, just the diversity of the performance. And the diversity of the missions is going to be
far higher. So of course, that leads to you know, and also the density is also going to be much higher in depth. You know, the current NASS maybe is about 50, to 70,000 operations a day, depending if you exclude or include the GA, we could foresee going into an environment there's millions of operations, if you start looking at the US small UAS, as large UAS is and advanced Air Mobility, it's hard to believe, isn't it? Exactly. So given those two things, there's going to be higher
levels of complexity. So therefore, we have to start looking at our environment to say, how do we add additional automation to assist a human? Because if we say that the human alone is by themselves responsible for the safe operation of that environment, I think we can all agree that the bandwidth and reaction time is going to be stressed for a human
operator. So therefore, how do we introduce additional automation to assist humans such that we can provide them that predictive risk, and predictive safety as services and capabilities to assist them in the safe maintenance of the current aviation system? In one can also look in terms of the society's acceptance of, of safety events, where no one can look and say, well, the United States, we have the safest aviation in the world, you know, perhaps one can extrapolate, say
one fatality every 10 to 15 years. And if we say, we're going into an environment, we're going to have millions of operations, one can't just extrapolate and say, Okay, we're going to have a million fatalities every 1015 years, society is not going to accept that. So that's where as we try to enhance the safety several fold, that is going to be our challenge in making sure that we have the right capabilities and technologies to be able to assist humans in that endeavor is going to be the key.
And properly integrating all these new users into the into the airspace is is essential, right? You can't have a drone delivering a package wandering across the, the approach path here at DCA or something like that, so that the work has been is cut out to make sure that all the new entrants are operating in a way that keeps everybody safe. Traveling and shipping public.
Absolutely. I mean, that's one of the the main focus areas of NASA's research on on the new entrants and advanced air mobility in UAS is is essentially the two focus areas are integration into the NASS and how do we integrate these vehicles safely with the existing you know, operations such that you know, any and all vehicles can cohabitate and coexist harmoniously and safely. And then the second aspect is the the safety capabilities and services For these vehicles,
so we talk about fatigue a lot with more operations, especially coming out of the pandemic. Fatigue has become an issue for for many of our members, because the airlines had a tendency to bring back flying faster than they, they could, or maybe they some should have, because we have the airplanes, but less pilots, because of early retirements.
It's tough. But again, fatigue is front center. Some of the research that NASA has conducted has been is crucial to gaining understanding on fatigue, how it impacts pilots, and how it impacts safety. You're currently studying and you're wrapping up a fatigue research sometime this summer. Is there any? Is there any insight into that or any any kind of data, your team's looking at some let us know a little something early as I guess what I'm asking? Sure.
So we're working with, you know, several airline partners, both domestic and international, in the primary objectives are, essentially to look at circadian rhythms for example, and being able to identify, you know, the effect of that on the pilots, alertness, and also look for scheduling of the crew. Because no humans, no two humans are all
alike, right? We all have different circadian rhythms. And we are all you know, there's people that are, we say they're the morning people, afternoon people and late day people, right, and some people are much better in the evenings. So how do you given the natural rhythms and Alert States of each crew
member? Is there a way to be able to schedule them such that now you're putting the crew members on the most optimum scheduled given their most alert circadian rhythms rather than just one size fits all says everybody is doing red eyes?
Well, some people are better at red eyes than others. So how do we how do we do that crew resourcing, we have looked at for example, the the cockpit lighting conditions, and being able to say, Okay, are there certain lighting situations better than others, for First of all, for each individual pilot, but also for the, you know, the the hour of operation and the duration of the flight. And other things that we have looked at, for example, is the development of this little tool
that we've developed. It's essentially it's a pilot alertness tool, PVT plus, you know, and it's been used by several airlines in the United States, where essentially, it's, it's this iPhone app based tool that one can enter your, you know, your your sleep cycle information, but also do a little test. And it immediately provides information back to say, Okay, what is the state of alertness for the individual, such that the individuals and airlines can make better
informed decisions? So these are some some things that have been studied through this study that you mentioned. But of course, you know, human fatigue and human factors is going to be an ongoing work. So even though the current study will wrap up shortly, we wouldn't tend to be carrying on our investment there going forward for other purposes.
Speaking of human factors, can you speak to how human factors and how the resiliency of of pilots humans contribute to the safety of flight operations?
Certainly. So here, I would like to quote one of our, you know, colleagues, Kim Pyle from FAS abs, she's been using these words quite a bit in terms of the humans have the three C's, you know, curiosity, creativity and compassion. And, and that is something that automation does not have in at the end of the day, it's those, you know, among many others, but those at least those three traits that human provides, always leads to our safer, you know, Operation
environment for for aviation. And this is, you know, one can also look at, you know, how do we use the human contributions to safety, and what are what is each pilot doing on a daily basis? That's leading to the safe operation of the NASS and and how do we use the inherent ability of a human to be able to contribute to safety and do the appropriate human machine teaming? Because if you provide Adding additional information and assistance through automation, want to make sure
that we avoid mode confusions, right? Or any other things. And one of the things that, for example, I would even go as far as to say is perhaps a misnomer is when somebody says, Oh, this was due to human error. And in no, I would kind of strongly suggest that nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I'm going to go to work today, no matter what they do, and no matter what line of work, they're, and I'm going to go and have a human error today. You know, no matter what line of work you're in, if
one does occur, there's always a contributing factor. So being able to look and avoid, and remove those contributing factors that lead to doubt. So those are what our focus areas are in being able to make sure that the human does not have these additional distractions, or additional contributing factors that essentially gets in their way of maintaining a safe environment. Absolutely.
Couldn't have said that better myself. Well, thank you for joining us today Akbar. Safety and aviation is truly a team effort, and we appreciate the work you and your program are doing to strengthen safety and an aviation. Beginning this month, you can read more about the work of the aerospace operations and safety program and a series we're doing
in collaboration with NASA in our magazine. I also want to thank Captain Wendy Morris, our national safety coordinator, our ASR chairs, and the hundreds of pilot volunteers and staff that make up our air safety, organization, and engineering and air safety. Their tireless efforts have contributed to the safest period in our history. However, the work continues as we always strive to improve safety and caring our pastures, fellow crew, and cargo. Thank you for tuning in to this
episode of The airline pilot podcast. If you haven't already, make sure you subscribe so that you do not miss any episodes. And if you enjoy this episode, let your fellow crew members know about the show. If you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, reach out to podcast@alpa.org to listen and subscribe to the airline pilot podcast or learn more about Alpha. Check us out online@alpa.org Or find us on all major podcast platforms. Until next time, this is the
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