REACTOR

Aviation safety is of paramount concern to everyone in the aerospace industry from component, equipment, system and whole aircraft designers and manufacturers through airline operators, flight and ground crew to passengers. Cockpit workload and specifically pilot workload and situational awareness have been identified as key contributors to aircraft safety and have been cited along with aircraft system complexity in a number of recent accident reports. As cockpit crew are key actors during the flight, their behaviour and actions play a major role in the achievement of the safety performance. In addition, cockpit avionics, providing the tools to support the crew’s activities and allowing the interaction between the pilot, the aircraft and the outside world, likewise play a significant role in providing several layers of protection.

Trends within the aerospace industry indicate potential for cockpit work load to increase:

There are currently worldwide some 19,000 civil aircraft flying, by 2034 this is widely expected to rise to nearly 38,500 and in that same timeframe 13,100 of the current fleet will be retired, providing a net production volume of 32,600 aircraft. While this shows good market potential it is also an indication that the airspace is becoming increasingly congested.
In 1981 when the Airbus A320 was launched at the Paris air show the average number of flight crew was 2.8, 30 years later in 2011 the average number of flight crew was 2.1. Taking this trend forward to the next generation of aircraft there is an anticipation that the average number will fall below 2.

One consequence of these trends is that pilots will need to work with increasingly complex aircraft systems and will need to operate in increasingly congested airspace with a potentially detrimental effect on pilot workload. At the same time the aerospace industry is working to ensure greater levels of safety. There is a need to introduce automation into the cockpit, simplifying aircraft operations and reducing cockpit effective workload.

The objective of the REACTOR project is to develop and evaluate a suite of technologies in support of reduced cockpit workload and improved situational awareness.