Towards eMCO/SiPO: A Human Factors Efficacy, Usability, and Safety Assessment for Direct Voice Input (DVI) Implementation in the Flight Deck

The recent aviation industry trend towards commercial extended multi-crew operations (eMCO) and single-pilot operations (SiPO) creates the necessity to offload tasks from the future commercial pilot and facilitate their flying duties. The application of DVI should be reconsidered to facilitate pilots’ workload (WL) management on the future flight deck. eMCO/SiPO may not require a complete flight deck redesign at this moment and sound use of existing technology may hold a key role in this transient period. Since there is still not a conclusive accuracy threshold for a DVI to operate in the aviation context, only critical actions were considered in early research. Existing commercially available DVI technology maybe ready to serve some low impact/ non time-critical applications in eMCO/SiPO (e.g., weather at destination and alternate airports update during cruise phase).

The research was conducted in two stages. Initially, a systematic literature review utilised the proven three pilar framework in-depth investigation method. Based on the validation criteria of the viability, operational reliability and functional utility as used by General Dynamics and USAF, the study argued that DVI could be considered reliable and safe for deployment on the flight deck for candidate target applications. Based on the frequency of reference in the reviewed literature and the context relevance, operational reliability could be related to accuracy (or error rate), error types, language used (vocabulary and grammar), aviation environmental conditions, feedback, transparency, adaptivity and transaction time. DVI’s operational viability and reliability are interwoven its contextually applied utility. Based on the frequency of reference in the reviewed literature and thematic analysis, the existing and target applications could form five general categories and five sub-categories. These are a) data entry, with sub-categories FMS entries and frequency tuning, b) system management, sub-categorised into general, display reconfigurations and navigation, c) information retrieval, d) interactive assistant and e) operator monitoring.

A holistic complimentary approach was employed utilizing SMEs, pilots, and human factors experts to perform an efficacy, usability, and safety assessment under the eMCO/SiPO prism. The study narrowed down and prioritize the DVI target applications.