As part of the World ATM Congress (to be held from March 10th-12th 2015 at Madrid, Spain), HALA! will hold a workshop on " Identifying open issues for reduced-crew operation in the cockpit of large civil aircrafts and implications for the future ATM system ".

The air transport sector is facing several challenges to which stakeholders should accommodate in the near future. It is known that the introduction of automation in the aviation sector has changed the role of pilots modifying their roles towards strategic managers and supervisors while reducing their workload and low level interactions within the cockpit.

Reduced crew operation within the cockpit goes together with re-allocating tasks to other players such as flight dispatchers from airlines, ATCOS, maintenance or aircraft manufacturers experts but also towards automation. For that purpose ongoing studies taking place across Europe and United States are evaluating its feasibility from different points of view together with the implied reallocation of task among different stakeholders involved in the operations.

HALA¡ Research Network (Towards higher levels of automation in the future ATM System) is looking into future scenarios of the ATM and air transport system. HALA’s intends to examine the idea of operations with reduced crew taking into account its technical, social and legal aspects and their potential implications throughout the future ATM system especially in terms of reallocation of tasks between the various operators involved in operation beyond classical cooperation between flying crew and ATCOs. The objective of the workshop is to:
 

• To discuss the feasibility of pilot number reduction by the definition of a large scale collaborative system requiring the reallocation (and/or migration) of task among stakeholders to be able to cope with the long term needs of the future aviation system.  
• To assess the impact of reduced crew operations in the future ATM system including possible migration of tasks to ATCO.
• To debate the process of reduction of crew operation by designing party-autonomous systems that could perform dedicated tasks currently allocated to human operator.
• To identify open issues and opportunities that could be further explored in this field.

The workshop will take place on March 12th at 10.00 h at IFEMA, ATM Theather (Madrid, Spain) (http://www.worldatmcongress.org/)