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Established in 1945, the Wallops Flight Facility of Goddard Space Flight Center is NASA’s premier site for conducting research using suborbital vehicles such as aircraft, scientific balloons, and sounding rockets. Its partnership with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport expands the facility’s capabilities in supporting the launch of orbital vehicles. Since its beginnings as a facility for conducting high-speed research on aerodynamic designs, Wallops has launched more than 16,000 rockets carrying aircraft models, space and Earth science experiments, satellites, and technology development payloads. Partnering with academia, industry, and other government facilities in the mid-Atlantic region, Wallops is a test site for the introduction of unmanned aerial vehicle use in the national airspace system. Initially it didn’t have a balloon program but now has that responsibility as well. Wallops has many laboratories to support its many and diverse programs; some also support the Balloon Program, for example by testing possible materials for balloons at its Balloon Research and Development Laboratory.

Detect and avoid (DAA), an essential component to integrate unmanned aircraft (UA) systems into the National Airspace System, focuses largely on developing and enhancing algorithms to assess and define requirements for the loss of well clear with other aircraft in the system. This flight simulation experiment focuses on terminal area alerting capabilities in and around the local airport traffic pattern and seeks to address under which conditions should the DAA system switch between large and small alerting criteria. Piloting differences observed between manned-aircraft and UA pilots while operating a UA in the terminal area in flight simulation are reported in this paper. Data indicate that UA pilots were more comfortable with smaller separations between their UA and other aircraft in the traffic pattern than the manned-aircraft pilots.

NASA’s Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Sub-Project is engaged in research to facilitate the introduction of air taxis into the US National Airspace System. Given the history of conventional aircraft operations, it is clear that dispatcher support will be required for UAM. This paper presents a gap analysis, system requirements, and a workstation design concept for the UAM dispatcher or Fleet Manager (FM) position. The gap analysis focuses on the differences between the tasks of the airline dispatcher and those projected for the FM. FM system capabilities and data requirements are then presented as foundations for software development. An initial user interface concept is provided. The FM software uses a single, large display. The system supports prediction, monitoring, and task execution. This paper is intended to support FM software design for future air taxi systems.

Convective weather is one of the main causes of accidents in the National Airspace System according to the Federal Aviation Administration. This paper describes how the use of Human-Centered Design principles, along with Design Thinking, led to the design and development of a 3D-Augmented Strategic Weather Management System aiming to determine how strategic weather information presented both in 2D and 3D could impact pilots’ weather situation awareness and decision-making capabilities. This paper explains the five design iterations that were carried out over four years, including several knowledge elicitation, participatory design and evaluation sessions. The results are positive overall; pilots’ feedback is very rich and meaningful and will be implemented in the next prototypes. Further human-in-the-loop simulation evaluations will be conducted for consolidating usability and for evaluating pilots’ weather situation awareness and decision-making capabilities.

Single pilot and/or remotely piloted operations are becoming feasible in the national airspace system because of advances in autonomous systems, and the development of Human-Autonomy Teams (HAT). We compared a recommender tool for cockpit applications installed with HAT tools or No HAT tools, using simulations of off-nominal events varying in severity. Pilots on average spent more time with the tool when the HAT features were present, but there was considerable variability between pilots in tool usage. However, greater time spent using the tool was associated with lower subjective workload (NASA TLX).

With the rapid growth of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), NASA was called upon to examine crucial operational and safety concerns regarding the integration of UAS into the National Airspace System (NAS) in collaboration with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and industry. Key research efforts paper focused on understanding and developing requirements for Detect and Avoid (DAA) systems and making sure they are interoperable with Collision Avoidance (CA) technologies. These requirements detail necessary performance of a DAA system designed to help the UAS pilot maintain DAA Well Clear (DWC) from intruder aircraft so that safe separation is retained. NASA Langley’s Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) simulation study known as Collision Avoidance, Self-Separation, and Alerting Times (CASSAT) addressed these DAA requirements in a two-phase study. The first phase examined eleven active air traffic controllers. The second phase, addressed in this paper, examined twelve pilots’ interactions with DAA systems at simulated UAS ground control stations (GCS).

As technology evolves to the Internet of Things (IoT), understanding context of the information about and from those things can be challenging. Numerous distributed heterogeneous devices reporting large quantities of data, and that may be interconnected to provide evolving services to multiple stakeholders will be characteristic of IoT ecosystems. Although the IoT is in the incubation phase, we can gain perspectives from current Networks of Things. In this article the author defines characteristics of complex domains that affect network management, including a case study of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) National Airspace System (NAS). Today’s tools, standards, and models are not sufficient to capture operating domain knowledge consistent to these characteristics. The author offers a new model to serve as a framework to obtain domain knowledge context for the individual resources and their applicable services, while simplifying complexity needed for effective maintenance management.

This chapter discusses how the U.S. controls airspace during rocket launches (Fig. 4.1). While other countries have procedures in place to control airspace during launch events, these are not as sophisticated as those administered by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which has developed the most advanced means of integrating launch vehicles into its national airspace system

In the not-so-distant future, if you believe the articles in Popular Mechanics or Wired, the more affluent sections of society will have the option of rocketing between London and Sydney or between New York and Beijing in just 2 h (Fig. 8.1). Or less. It’s called suborbital point-to-point (SPTP) and, if those articles or to be believed, it will radically alter intercontinental commuting. At least for a privileged few. With the advent of suborbital reusable launch vehicles (sRLV) comes the potential for PTP transportation which has long been heralded as a revolutionary mode of air transport. One study published by the International Space University (ISU) in 2008 calculated the transatlantic flight time for a sRLV between New York and London could be as quick as 75 min. While such rapid global transport of passengers makes PTP an attractive space technology proposition, its success is dependent on a number of factors. First, PTP transport needs to be integrated into not only the National Airspace System (NAS) but also into International Airspace. Second, there are myriad institutional, technical and operational issues that must be resolved before supersonic and hypersonic PTP systems (Fig. 8.2) can be flown between major cities. And third, dedicated spaceports may need to be co-located with existing airports.

The National Airspace System (NAS) Enterprise Architecture (EA) describes Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) goals, operational changes, planned infrastructure changes, and guidance materials that are referenced by FAA programs throughout the acquisition process. To strengthen the presence of human factors in NAS infrastructure plans and improvements, the FAA Human Factors Research and Engineering Division executed a redesign of the Human System Integration (HSI) Roadmap. This paper will present the methods utilized to redesign the HSI Roadmap, provide an overview of sample human factors integration opportunities, and key lessons learned.

Small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) represent a significant instrument for improving task efficiency and effectiveness across numerous industries and operational environments. However, concern has grown regarding potentially irresponsible operation and public apprehension to potential privacy loss. These concerns, combined with unique sUAS human factors challenges, may lead to unwanted and dangerous results, including reduction of safety, property damage, and loss of life. Such challenges include lack of command, control, and communication (C3) standardization; detection, tracking, and managing operations; and human perceptual and cognitive issues. Issues and concerns could be significant barriers to permitting routine and sustainable operations in the National Airspace System (NAS), but by closely examining these factors may be possible to devise strategies to better support future application. This exploratory study seeks to provide a review of relevant exigent literature as well as condense findings into sets of recommendations and guidelines for human factors in sUAS adoption and use.

Airspace integration is a major challenge that must be addressed for wider unmanned aircraft system (UAS) acceptance and one-day ubiquitous operations. Both research and training play a role in addressing these challenges, which are cross-disciplinary. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) is heavily invested in promoting the safe integration of UAS into both the United States National Airspace System (NAS) as well its future under the FAA NextGen programs planned upgrades. This paper surveys ERAUs use of modeling and simulation (M&S) to address the relevant challenges including development of flight management systems (FMS) for UAS to operate amongst manned air traffic, the development of aircraft performance models for various UAS categories, the application of simulator technologies to UAS flight crew training, and the creation of virtual labs to provide realistic training experience for UAS system configuration and testing.

As the technological and operational capabilities of unmanned aircraft systems UAS continue to grow, so too does the need to introduce these systems into civil airspace. Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the National Airspace System is a NASA research project that addresses the integration of civil UAS into non-segregated airspace operations. One of the major challenges of this integration is the lack of an on-board pilot to comply with the legal requirement that pilots see and avoid other aircraft. The need to provide an equivalent to this requirement for UAS has motivated the development of a detect and avoid DAA capability to provide the appropriate situational awareness and maneuver guidance in avoiding and remaining well clear of traffic aircraft. Formal methods has played a fundamental role in the development of this capability. This talk reports on the formal methods work conducted under NASA's Safe Autonomous System Operations project in support of the development of DAA for UAS. This work includes specification of low-level and high-level functional requirements, formal verification of algorithms, and rigorous validation of software implementations. The talk also discusses technical challenges in formal methods research in the context of the development and safety analysis of advanced air traffic management concepts.

New flight deck technologies being developed under the proposed NextGen National Airspace System will require precise and efficient input from flight crews. The benefits of force feedback for these types of inputs in terms of a reduction in overall movement times have been shown in the past; however, an important component of input efficiency is the path taken by the cursor. The present study investigates the effects of multiple levels of two types of force feedback (gravitational and spring forces) on the path of movement for a target selection task. Mean square error from an ideal straight line path and cursor speeds in terms of the distance from the target were measured. Results suggest that increasing the gravitational force has an effect on path error at short distances and produces higher cursor speeds as the target is approached.