Systems Thinking in Aerospace: The Contributions to the Design of Future Airliners’ Single Pilot Operations

Abstract

Systems thinking methods have evolved into a popular toolkit in Human Factors to analyze complex sociotechnical systems at early design stages, such as future airliners’ single pilot operations (SPO). A quantitative re-analysis of studies from a systematic literature review (Schmid & Stanton, 2019b) was conducted to categorically assess their contributions to researching SPO and to fitting their systems thinking methods to contemporary Human Factors problems. Although only 15 of 79 publications applied systems thinking methods to operational, automation, and the pilot incapacitation issue(s) of SPO, these studies provided a comprehensive concept of operations that is able to deal with many issues of future single-piloted airliners. These theoretical models require further evaluation by looking at the empirical instances of system behavior. Finally, the hierarchical structures in system’s development and operations from systems thinking enable Human Factors professionals and researchers to approach SPO systematically.