Confronting Aerotowing Experts With a New Phase-of-Flight Taxonomy for Towplanes

Abstract: While designing an automated flight control system for aerotowing gliders, engineers realized that no suitable phase-of-flight taxonomy was available for performing a functional hazard assessment. As first experiences with a custom taxonomy were gathered, questions arose on how reproducible these results were and whether they could be applied to aerotow-related tasks outside the systems engineering domain. Inter-rater agreement, as one key metric of the taxonomy, was investigated by having 13 experts on aerotowing rate a total of 30 scenarios that are presented as photographs, video sequences, and textual narratives. Agreement between experts was substantial across these types of media. The remaining sources of disagreement were found to be of little practical relevance during real-world application of the aerotowing taxonomy.