Issue 2/94
Montréal, Canada - For the past 18 months, the Société
de transport de la communauté urbaine de Montréal (STCUM)
has been using WOMBAT for selecting traffic controllers at the subway transit
Operational Central Control (OCC).
"WOMBAT has been the primary means of selection for all new controllers
since we found that Situational Awareness Assessment had a very high correlation
with future performance, both in training and on the job," reported
Mr. Christian Thibault, an Engineer involved with the selection program,
when asked about the U$30 000 WOMBAT system. "Once the primary ranking
of candidates is established by WOMBAT, we take the best subjects to an
interview for final confirmation or veto. We also tested 60 known controllers
to establish a reference threshold score below which candidates are automatically
eliminated from the list."
The STCUM has tested over 120 applicants and it was not long until positive results appeared. Mr. René Lambert, Training Coordinator explains, "I have been training future controllers for years and have seen all types of trainees. The last ones were entirely selected by WOMBAT and proved to be the best trainees ever."
Not unlike the air traffic controllers, the metro controllers often operate
by teams of two. Each team is assigned one metro circuit for the entire
duration of the work shift. Efficient traffic management depends on crew
coordination and team compatibility. When asked about crew pairing difficulties,
Mr. J. L. Thivierge, Section Chief at the OCC stated, "We hope to use
DuoWOMBAT to tell us which teams are compatible. Our controllers must face
periods of low workload and routine housekeeping tasks, as well as periods
of extreme operational stress, dealing with real-time emergency procedures.
We need to assess the social skills required during these two different
states. If DuoWOMBAT delivers what seems to be the most comprehensive CRM
assessment there is, it is very likely that we will use it."
Read more about the use of WOMBAT at the STCUM in AeroNews
1/97.
Ottawa, Canada - The new version of WOMBAT-FC for assessing flow controllers
was demonstrated for the first time during the International Federation
of Air Traffic Controller's Associations Conference (IFATCA '94), held here
last April. A record number of delegates (749) from 76 countries had the
opportunity to try WOMBAT-FC v1.2 and to discuss its use with ÆRO
INNOVATION's specialists. "We held over 250 full-length demonstrations
during the four days of the exhibition, which exceeded our expectations
for this conference", stated Mr. Doug Woods, California-based West
Coast Representative for WOMBAT. "Some [participants] said they made
the trip specifically to see the WOMBAT-FC selection system, which is an
indication of the need for better screening devices before investing huge
amounts of public money on training."
In 1945, on Peleliu Island in the Western Pacific, I happened to be watching as a C-46 came in for a smooth landing on a coral runway, then appeared to settle under the surface like a submarine starting to submerge. There were sparks and an explosion, and I suddenly realized that the copilot must have retracted the wheels instead of the flaps after touchdown. We had never been warned about that possibility during our training in C-46s, but I made a mental note to keep a sharp eye on my copilot's left hand the next time I landed.
by Dr. Stanley N. Roscoe
V.-P. Research & Development
It is a reasonably safe bet that the first time anyone intentionally
tried to apply a psychological principle to solve a human factors problem
in airplane cockpit design occurred during World War II, and it is possible
that the wheels-up-after-landing problem was the first such case. In 1943,
a young psychologist, Lt. Alphonse Chapanis, was called on to figure out
why pilots and copilots of P-47s, B-17s, B-25s, and several other airplanes
frequently retracted the wheels instead of the flaps after landing. It was
also noted that copilots of C-47s never made that "pilot error."
Chapanis, who was the only psychologist at Wright Field until the war was
over, had never heard about human factors in equipment design, but of course
in 1943 no one had. Still, he immediately realized that side-by-side wheel
and flap controls - in most cases identical toggle switches or nearly identical
levers, as in the case of the C-46 - could easily be confused and that the
so-called pilot errors were really cockpit design errors. On the C-47 the
corresponding controls were not adjacent, and their methods of actuation
were quite different; hence they were never confused.
As an immediate wartime fix, a small rubber-tired wheel was attached to
the end of the wheel control and a small wedge-shaped end to the flap control
on several airplanes (unfortunately, not our C-46s), and the pilots and
copilots of the modified planes stopped retracting their wheels after landing.
When the war was over, these mnemonically shaped wheel and flap controls
were standardized worldwide, as were the tactually discriminable heads of
the power control levers found in current airplanes. Although supported
by research, the application of shape coding to the tops of rotary switch
knobs and the bats of toggle switches has not occurred.
Before the new breed of engineering psychologists became involved in airplane
cockpit design (immediately after World War II), questions of how flight
instruments and controls were configured and placed were generally resolved
by the airplane designers without realizing that perceptual and motor control
principles were involved. Occasionally flight surgeons and veteran pilots
were consulted, but each tended to go along with existing precedent and
resist change. When new sensing devices were invented, such as the gyroscopic
Sperry Horizon in 1929, the question of whether the symbol representing
the horizon or the symbol representing the airplane should move was settled
in favor of the moving horizon almost by default.
When Jimmy Doolittle and other pilots experienced difficulty in remembering
that the moving bar represented the horizon and not the airplane, it was
realized that there was a problem. A few radical thinkers advanced the notion
that the horizon should be fixed and the airplane symbol should move, just
as the pilot perceives his or her own airplane moving against the real horizon.
After a few years of argument, a nonflying naval flight surgeon, John ("Jack")
Poppen, published an article in 1936 that seemed to settle the matter. Essentially
Poppen's rationale was that the instrument's indication should be an exact
analogue of what would be seen through a porthole in the front of the airplane,
and so it is to this day.
The moving airplane advocates were put down, and pilots had to learn to
fly with a moving horizon indicator in bad weather. Unfortunately, in North
America alone, about 100 pilots each year crash into the ground in a high-speed
spiral dive when they perceive the moving horizon bar as the airplane and
try to control it accordingly. Despite the difficulty of learning to use
the gyro horizon and the continuing fatalities from graveyard spirals when
low-time pilots proceed into bad weather, the issue remained dormant until
the advent of the all-weather radar interceptor planes in the late 1940s
and early 1950s. The moving horizon bar on their cathode ray tube attack
steering displays was even more conducive to roll control reversals by interceptor
pilots.
Avoiding roll control reversals with the moving horizon was only one of
the pilot's problems. Pilots occasionally misread the notorious three-pointer
altimeter by 1000 feet or, in high-flying airplanes, by 10,000 feet. When
radio navigation graduated from the four-course auditory "beams"
and automatic direction finders to the very-high-frequency omnidirectional
ranges, distance-measuring equipment, and instrument landing systems, pilots
had to cope with the nefarious cross-pointer indicator and the digital counter.
Then came the moving-tape altimeters and airspeed indicators and the most
recent blow, the head-up and head-mounted collimated imaging displays and
the consequent epidemic of controlled-flight-into-terrain accidents.
The perceptual-motor problems encountered by pilots during the evolution
of aircraft instrumentation have received serious experimental attention
by aviation engineering psychologists during the half-century since the
end of World War II. The beauty of the research is that we now have several
well-established display design principles that have application beyond
the immediate settings of the individual experiments. The cumulative benefit
of the application of the various principles is not merely the additive
sum of their individual benefits - it is more akin to their mathematical
product, as suggested by the findings shown in Figure 1 (adapted from Lintern,
Roscoe and Sivier, 1990).
The curves in the figure represent the initial performances of independent
groups of naive pilot trainees learning to land a flight simulator. The
principles applied in the augmented pictorial display include pictorial
integration, direction of motion compatibility via frequency separation,
command guidance, flight path prediction, and near-optimum scaling. The
augmented symbolic display embodied the same principles except that they
were incorporated into a symbolic format, as in a flight director display.
The nonaugmented pictorial display was, as the name suggests, a computer
animated view of an airport scene that was dynamically responsive to the
changing altitude and flight path of the simulated airplane.
The display principles that make forward-looking, integrated aircraft attitude
and flight path displays so effective are equally applicable to downward-looking,
map-type navigation displays with integrated dynamic traffic information;
side-looking, integrated flight profile and energy-management displays;
and integrated altitude and vertical speed displays. Unfortunately, these
principles have not been applied consistently - some not at all - in our
modern "glass cockpits." If they were, there would be huge reductions
in pilot training requirements, safer and more effective flight operations,
and a sudden competitive advantage for the avionics company and airline
that first adopted this scientifically supported approach.
Sofia, Bulgaria - West met East as the ÆRO INNOVATION INC. training
team arrived at the Transport Medical Institute for a one-week training
on the WOMBAT CS and FC software. Headed by Dr. Nikolay Paynov, MD, the
Aero Polyclinic is the Organization mandated by the Institute for selecting
Bulgaria's pilots and air traffic controllers. "We take aviation personnel
selection very seriously, and WOMBAT is the tool we have been expecting
for years," reported Dr. Paynov.
Flight Safety Specialist Elly Michova with Aero Innovation's President Jean LaRoche. Ms. Michova was part of the delegation that evaluated the two WOMBAT systems in Montreal, during the October 1993 Human Factors Conference.
Indeed, each candidate goes under intensive scrutiny for several days at
the Polyclinic. The team of specialists includes Cardiologists, Psychologists,
Ophthalmologists, Internists, Otorhinolaryngologists, Psychiatrists and
several Physicians. "We plan to rapidly include WOMBAT in our selection
process because it assesses aptitudes we have been trying to measure for
years," stated Psychiatrist and team leader Dr. Dobrin Dantchev (below).
Mr. Dobrin Dantchev
Several research projects are also under way, headed by Psychologists Pentcheva
and Ivanov. The research will include test/retest scenarios using the DuoWOMBAT-CS
CRM Evaluator, in coordination with Sofia based Balkan Bulgarian Airlines.
When asked about his stay in Bulgaria before returning to Montréal,
ÆRO INNOVATION's President Jean LaRoche declared, "I would like
to come back as soon as possible. The Bulgarian hospitality is out of this
world; this has been a great WOMBAT trip for us, both professionally and
personally."
Psychologists and Research Associates, Elena Pentcheva and Mr. Ivanov, during the WOMBAT training at Sofia Airport, Bulgaria. The two WOMBAT consoles are installed side-by-side in order to run the DuoWOMBAT-CS CRM Evaluator.
