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Analyzing the Fleet Manager Interface User Experience with Qualitative Data Coding
DescriptionIn the future, it is projected that there will be a market boom in electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) and Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) aircraft transportation (Federal Aviation Administration [FAA], 2022; 2023). Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is a concept that predicts an increasing demand for services such as passenger transport (i.e., air taxis) (Northeast UAS Airspace Integration Research Alliance [NUAIR], 2021), cargo transport (Wolter et al., 2023), and public services (i.e., wildfire response) (Martin et al., 2021), among many others. It is envisioned that human and autonomy teams (HAT) will be used to perform flight operations in an AAM world. Rather than the traditional 1:1, operator to aircraft mapping, a HAT could be responsible for the aggregate management of a company’s entire fleet. Through increased use of autonomous systems, it is likely there will be a progressive need for “Fleet Managers” (FMs) to manage multiple aircraft simultaneously.

To address some of the issues of the emerging AAM concept, the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) created the High Density Vertiplex (HDV) sub-project. The purpose of HDV was to conduct both virtual and live aerial flight tests to study terminal area eVTOL flight operations within an AAM ecosystem (Glaab et al., 2022). To do this, HDV implemented a highly automated airspace management system along with several tools that used automation to aid human operational roles. One of the tools that was developed for the Fleet Manager was a prototype traffic management tool called the Fleet Management Interface (FMI). Some of the key features of the FMI included, 1) a map display of the airspace, 2) a tool to schedule flights called the “schedule page”, 3) status updates about flights, called “operations page”, 4) a tool designed to partially automate a nominal flight procedure called “Missed Approach”, and 5) alert notifications indicating that an action is required.

In 2023, HDV conducted two flight tests, during which user experience (UX) assessments were performed to 1) evaluate the overall UX of the FMI, and 2) identify information requirements for improved situational awareness for FMs. Participants assumed the role of FM and performed a series of flight operational tasks using the FMI. Then, FMs were surveyed on a range of human factors topics. A portion of the survey was devoted to eliciting responses in an open-ended format. The following will discuss a qualitative data coding technique called Actionable String Coding (ASC) that was implemented to organize the open-ended responses and provide a summary of the results from the UX studies.
Event Type
Industry/Practitioner Case Study
Lecture
TimeWednesday, September 11th8:30am - 8:50am MST
LocationFLW Salon A
Tracks
Aerospace Systems
Usability and System Evaluation