Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine August 2016 - 46

Book Review DOI. No. 10.1109/MAES.2016.160059 Facing the Unexpected in Flight Jean Pinet CRC Press (Taylor and Francis), Boca Raton, FL, USA, 2015 ISBN: 9781498718714, Hardcover and ebook format: 233 pages Review by Thomas B. Sheridan, MIT, Cambridge, MA USA O ne must respect airline pilots for the amazing skill they have acquired. We all know how to drive a car and operate the steering wheel and pedals to maneuver a car at speed and sometimes within a few feet of other cars that are stationary or moving in the opposite direction. Some of us know how to sail boats using a tiller and a few ropes to tack upwind and come about with fickle wind gusts. But the airline pilot! To have acquired a mental model of how to operate multiple controls, some embodying a degree of automation, to regulate thrust, speed, attitude, altitude, and heading-all interacting in complex nonlinear ways in three dimensions of space plus time as governed by the physical constraints of aerodynamics and control-what is going on in the pilot's head? In 1943 psychologist Kenneth Craik coined the term "mental model" to characterize one's cognitive activity about the current and future state of a physical system that one is interacting with. A mental model is assumed to be more than just knowledge, but rather a visualized structure of interacting elements that simulate that part of the external world of immediate interest and allow for understanding and prediction. Following B. F. Skinner's influential 1938 Behavior of Organisms, psychology mostly dismissed the idea of knowing anything about the inner workings of cognitive activity. Those critics believed that since such events are not observable, the only way forward was to regard human behavior in black-box fashion. That meant focusing on the relation of overt responses to given stimuli, both observable in experiments with animals and human subjects. Then the digital computer come along and computer operations became a metaphor for a new cognitive science, the idea being that the brain functioned as if computer-like operations were going on in the head, even if that is not exactly the way the neurophysiology really worked. While arguments rage over whether the brain functions anything like a computer, influential psychologists such as Philip Johnson-Laird have postulated elegant mental models based on inferred if-then-else rules, sometimes many such rules, based on experiments in which subjects are observed in solving simple puzzles. It is in this vein that Pinet has written Facing the Unexpected in Flight. Pinet is as well qualified to write about what pilots are thinking (or should be thinking) as anyone in the world. He began his career in the French Air Force, served as flight test engineer and test pilot for Airbus on the Concorde and other aircraft, and headed pilot training for the Concorde, A300, and A340. He also served as president and Secretary General of the Air and Space Academy. He holds 46 a Ph.D. in psychology-ergonomics, and is clearly familiar with the work of other well-known engineering-based cognitive modeling efforts such as those of Jen Rasmussen and Rene Amalberti. Pinet's book develops a mental model of how pilots think under extreme time stress, down to a few seconds in some cases, and he applies that model to a variety of flight cases. The elements of the model include a number of notions from cognitive science: an operating system, agents (that perform specific ifthen-else functions), a differentiation between long- and short-term memory, and under what conditions certain agents are retrieved from long-term memory to perform certain cognitive functions to interact with short-term memory. His descriptions of how the model works in each case are interwoven with the explanations of the known physics of aircraft aerodynamics and control that the pilot must surely have coded into his memory. The book is amply illustrated with event and action time lines, illustrations of the instruments panel that the pilot must visually scan and interpret, and diagrams of the orientation and trajectory of the aircraft. A final chapter discusses the many aspects of piloting unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs, or drones) that are so salient for today and tomorrow. Finally, included are a number of appendices including descriptions of aircraft systems, psychological concepts used, and a glossary of terms that comprise the rich jargon of professional piloting. In conclusion, I must admire this effort as an in-depth look at what aircraft piloting is all about. As a very inexperienced private pilot myself, I am very aware of the complexities and difficulties of mentally integrating all of what Pinet discusses. I would regard the book as a valuable tool for the nonpilot to get an idea of what piloting entails, and for the pilot to calibrate himself against what is in the book. The book is also a valiant effort to frame a mental model for a very sophisticated type of task. With regard to the latter I would have to assert that the jury is still out regarding the issue of whether such complex models as Pinet proposes are acceptable to the scientist who demands direct observation and model validation. This is the cloud that still hangs over mental modeling in general. IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE AUGUST 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine August 2016