Constraint analysis for aircraft landing in distributed crewing contexts

The aim of this paper is to analyze human factors related and methodological constraints that prevent the distributed crewing or single pilot operational concept to be pushed forward in commercial aviation. First, it has been argued that alternatives for current commercial flight operations are not necessarily constrained by technology, but by the human factors characteristics of the socio- technical systems enabling these operations. In this paper, we present a constraint analysis of the landing phase of flight (both manual and automatic) using Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA). Given that CWA enables linking constraints related to human and non-human elements of the system and their interactions, CWA supports exploring systemic design solutions for distributed crewing operation. We argue that automatic landing calls for designing for distributed situational awareness, whereas manual landing calls for designing novel human roles in the overall system. Second, distributed crewing concept is being researched by several research groups simultaneously and with various methodologies, including expert interviews, semi-structured task analysis, experiments, policy and historical analysis. In the second half of the paper we argue that successfully progressing towards distributed crewing will require collaboration between research groups and integrating findings obtained with mixed methods. We explore strategies for mixed-method integration in the context of designing distributed crewing operations.