Flight procedures automation: Towards flight autonomy in manned aircraft

Safe aviation operations rely on the flight crews’ adherence to operating procedures for normal, abnormal and emergency situations. Crew operations can be enhanced by applying a certain automation level to procedures (both on commanded actions and monitoring aspects), thus reducing pilot workload and increasing the crews’ mental spare capacity. Succeeding in partial automation of flight procedures is deemed a first step towards flight autonomy substantiated on ArtificialIntelligence (AI) based systems in the long term. It also paves the way towards reduced crew or unmanned operations. This paper presents Cockpit Automation Procedures System (CAPS) as an initial prototype of this kind of automation. This technology, developed as contributor to Enhanced Flight Operations and Functions within the Clean Sky 2 framework, is capable of automatically executing crew procedures with an adjustable automation level and authority delegation and enables monitoring of pilot actions on cockpit controls. This project has received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 945583. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the Clean Sky 2 JU members other than the Union. The results, opinions, conclusions, etc. presented in this work are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily represent the position of the JU; the JU is not responsible for any use made of the information contained herein