Progressing Toward Airliners’ Reduced-Crew Operations: A Systematic Literature Review

ABSTRACT

Objective: The present article undertakes a systematic review of the current state of science for Single-Pilot Operations (SPO) and Reduced-Crew Operations (RCO) in commercial aviation.

Background: SPO/RCO have been investigated with different methods from various disciplines and different organizations to make research progress. The results of federal agencies’, universities’, and EU-projects’ research activities have not been brought together for synthesis yet.

Method: We systematically searched for SPO and RCO as independent and fixed search terms retrieving altogether 75 publications on the topic. Exclusion criteria were general and military aviation.

Results: Establishing an appropriate function allocation to cope with high workload and off-nominal situations could be achieved by applying a variety of methods and the consideration of advanced automation systems. Their application is required to investigate pilot incapacitation and communication issues further. Data-link and certification issues were acknowledged in principle and have not been solved yet.

Conclusion: In sum, experimental studies and modeling techniques of system ergonomics have addressed operational issues very well. Pilot health monitoring systems are less well elaborated than system protection. Future research needs to integrate different research findings and automation technologies. This is necessary to make RCO to a viable and attractive option for commercial development in aviation.

Abbreviations: ACFP: Autonomous Constrained Flight Planner; AOC: Airline Operations Center; ATC: Air Traffic Control; BP: Blood Pressure; CNPC: Control and Non-Payload Communication; ConOps: Concept of Operations; CMS: Crew Monitoring System; CRM: Crew Resource Management; CWA: Cognitive Work Analysis; EACS: Emergency Aircraft Control System; EAS: Emergency Avoidance System; EAST: Event Analysis of Systemic Teamwork; ECG: Electrocardiogram; EDA: Electrodermal Activity; EEG: Electroencephalogram; EMG: Electromyogram; EOG: Electrooculogram; ESP: Electronic Stand-by-Pilot; FMS: Flight Management System; fNRIS: functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy; FRF: Flight Reconfiguration Function; GS: Ground Station; HAT: Human-Autonomy Teaming; HR: Heart Rate; HTA: Hierarchical Task Analysis; IATA: International Air Transport Association; MCO: Multi-Crew Operations; NASA-TLX: NASA Task Load Index; OESD: Operational Event Sequence Diagrams; OTDS: On-board Threat Detection System; PF: Pilot Flying; PKI: Public Key Infrastructure; PM: Pilot Monitoring; RCO: Reduced-Crew Operations; RR: Respiratory Rate; SA: Situation Awareness; SART: Situation Awareness Rating Technique; SME: Subject Matter Expert; SNA: Social Network Analysis; SPO: Single-Pilot Operations; SRM: Single-Pilot Resource Management; STAMP: System-Theoretic Accident Modeling and Process; STPA: System-Theoretic Process Analysis; SVM: Support Vector Machine; TARMS: Threat Assessment and Response Management System; UAV: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles; VLJ: Very Light Jets; WDA: Work Domain Analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.