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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has established the strategic goal for System Capacity and Air Traffic Services to improve accessibility, flexibility and predictability in the aviation community in order to reduce flight times, crew resources, maintenance, and fuel costs. Free flight is a system concept that addresses this goal. However, the potential for certain human performance costs arise, such as a increases in flight crew workload, or decreases in flight crew errors as predicted by Supervisory Control Theory. An evaluation of system costs associated with transitioning to Free Flight using two First Principles modeling approach, the Man-Machine Integration Design and Analysis System (MIDAS) and the Integrated Performance Modeling Environment (IPME) will be performed. IPME is expected to show differential human performance effects in cockpit and air traffic control system performance over those predicted by Air MIDAS over 50 Monte Carlo simulation runs.

Over the past several years, BBN Inc. has been engaged in the development of a design workstation to provide a graphic and software tool-based representation of the human operator, the goals, the task environment, the procedural constraints and the equipment options associated with advanced cockpit design. The work has been directed toward design for advanced scout/attack helicopters (A3I) and for fighter aircraft (CAT). We have developed this workstation to provide the designer with graphic representation of design. The CAT effort developed a computer generated and dynamic timeline of operator goals, performance limits, tradeoffs and equipment configuration as a simulated fighter mission is flown. The designer was given the opportunity to modify the assumed equipment suite or goal structure and observe the affect of those manipulations on the timeline performance track.