"spatial disorientation mitigation: existing and new methods". In december 2014, as a result of analyzing 18 loss-of-control events, the commercial aviation safety team (cast) recommended research…

This federal contract award, valued at $235,861.00, was issued by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Langley Research Center to Honeywell International Inc.'s Aerospace Golden Valley (Advanced Technology) division. The contract supports NASA's Airspace Operations and Safety Program, specifically the Technologies for Aircraft State Awareness (TASA) sub-project, which aims to mitigate flight crew loss of airplane state awareness and spatial disorientation.

The objectives of the contract include assessing the benefits of displaying angle-of-attack information, developing algorithms and display strategies for stall recovery guidance, and designing cost-effective, user-centered flight deck alerting systems. This work is intended to raise the technology readiness level of these capabilities to enable their cost-effective implementation and certification. The contract is a cost-plus-fixed-fee Delivery Order placed under Honeywell's existing Flight Critical Systems Research Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract with NASA. The contract does not have a set-aside designation.

"spatial disorientation mitigation: existing and new methods". In december 2014, as a result of analyzing 18 loss-of-control events, the commercial aviation safety team (cast) recommended research into flight deck technologies that have potential to mitigate the problems and contributing factors that lead to flight crew loss of airplane state awareness (ASA) and conditions likely to produce spatial disorientation. The aviation community (government, industry and academia) have been charged with conducting research in the following areas: 1. Assess the relative benefits associated with various methods of displaying angle-of-attack on the flight deck. 2. Develop and refine algorithms and display strategies to provide control guidance for recovery from approach-to-stall or stall. 3. Develop and refine systems that predict the future aircraft energy state and/or autoflight configuration if the current course of action is continued and provide appropriate alerting. 4. Cost-effective, user-centered flight deck alerting systems to alert flight crews; especially for the two conditions that produced spatial disorientation in the ASA event data set (sub-threshold rolls and the somatogravic illusion). They suggest this research should raise the technology readiness level (TRL) of these features to a level that enables cost-effective implementation and certification of these technologies. This work supports the NASA airspace operations and safety program (aosp), air traffic management (ATM) technology demonstrations (ATD) project, technologies for aircraft state awareness (tasa) sub-project in support of casts safety enhancement #207, outcome #4.