Collaborative Design to Support Mutual Awareness in Single-Pilot Operation and Remote Collaboration

For economic reasons, manufacturers have been considering dedicating commercial flights to a single pilot for the last ten years. In order to ensure a certain redundancy, this pilot could be assisted by a ground pilot. In the absence of appropriate collaboration tools, the physical separation of these pilots will lead to a degradation of the mutual understanding of behaviors (observable fact on a person) and activities (i.e. mutual awareness). In order to restore mutual awareness, indicators of each pilot’s behavior (i.e. design element) need to be integrated into future flight tools. In this paper, we study the modalities of design elements in two new interfaces (ground and onboard) developed by iterations. These collaborative interfaces contain two types of elements: a remote display of the pilot’s eye movements, via an eye-tracking system, and an indicator of the activities performed in the tool (moving in the map, navigation in the tabs). Two remote collaboration scenarios were proposed to four professional pilots. They allowed to identify the cues to be transmitted, such as the availability of the pilots, and to test the transmission modalities: capture (eye-tracking, audio, interface inputs), temporality (continuous transmission) and representation (graphic, audio).