Data science and statistical analysis for human contributions to safety research

Key Skills

Data science techniques, Statistics

Job Description

The System-Wide Safety (SWS) Project is part of NASA Aeronautics’ Airspace Operations and Safety Program. It has two primary goals. The first goal is to explore, discover and understand how safety could be affected by the growing complexity of advanced aviation systems designed to improve the efficiency of flight, and the increasing number and type of aircraft – piloted and otherwise – available to an ever-growing number and type of customers. The second goal is to develop and demonstrate the research tools, innovative technologies and operational methods that will proactively mitigate those potential risks in order to maintain the aviation industry’s unparalleled safety record. SWS activities are directed toward building a system of expanded safety awareness that includes increased access to relevant data, integrated analysis capabilities, improved real-time detection and alerting of hazards, full decision support and automated safety mitigation strategies. The SWS project addresses three of NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate six strategic research thrusts, with the primary focus on Thrust 5, In-Time System-Wide Safety.

SWS Project research regarding safety-related advances in methods used for the verification and validation of advanced, increasingly autonomous systems (Advanced Air Mobility, AAM) also addresses elements of Thrusts 1 and 6. New concepts in system safety thinking have emerged to consider not only what may go wrong, but also what can be learned when things go right during commercial flight operations. The perspective of productive safety has been adopted by the NASA SWS Human Contributions to Safety (HC2S) team in addition to traditional safety thinking in the design of an upcoming flight simulation study. Taken together, these complementary perspectives form a more comprehensive approach to system safety thinking that can help to recognize and preserve the resilient performance capabilities currently provided by humans. A need exists, however, for research methods to enable better understanding of the human contributions to aviation safety. The SWS Project supports research on using flight simulation methods to study operator resilience and safety-producing behaviors.

Building on prior NASA efforts investigating procedural non-adherences during area navigation standard terminal route arrivals, a high-fidelity commercial aviation line operational simulation (LOS) experiment has been designed to study how flight crews anticipate, monitor for, respond to, and learn from expected and unexpected disturbances during these operations. A diverse set of LOS scenarios were developed to simulate highly realistic, complex, but routinely encountered operational situations. Each scenario has been designed to provide multiple opportunities to collect data on how flight crews manage threats and errors, as well as novel opportunities to observe resilient and safety-producing behaviors. The experimental design, implications for the study of safety-producing behaviors using simulation, and considerations for airline pilot training will be the primary benefits of the planned research study. The specific research activity within the SWS project, which this internship opportunity will support, is preparation for an upcoming study to be conducted by the HC2S team in the NASA Langley Cockpit Motion Facility flight simulator. The internship project will involve applying data science and statistical analysis techniques, and developing and testing aspects of the data workflow for the planned HC2S flight simulation study.

Academic Level: Graduate Master's

Preferred Major: Computer and Information Sciences - Computer Science;Computer and Information Sciences - Data Processing;Mathematics - Mathematics and Statistics;Mathematics - Statistics Mission Directorate Aeronautics Research

Mission Directorate: Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate