Stress Factors and the Impacts of COVID-19 Pandemic: A Review on the Aviation Industry

This study outlines the stress factors and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the stress variables among aviation workers, which includes airline employees, flight crews, pilots, maintenance crews, air traffic controllers, airport or ground workers, engineers, training personnel, and other aviation-related personnel. A review was done on 37 research papers using systematic literature review (SLR) and discovered nine stress factors among aviation workers which are working hours, workloads, internal factors, ergonomic issues, job uncertainty, job demands, organizational issues, team conflict, and the COVID-19 itself. The findings of this study could provide insights to employers in the aviation industry for mitigation actions that could help to successfully reduce and eliminate stress factors in the workplace. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Individual Surveillance Around Parked Aircraft at Nighttime: Thermal Infrared Vision-Based Human Action Recognition

The COVID-19 crisis has led to an unusually large number of commercial aircraft being currently parked or stored. For airlines, airports, and civil aviation authorities around the world, monitoring, and protecting these parked aircraft to prevent them from causing human-made damage are becoming urgent problems that are receiving increasing attention. In this study, we use thermal infrared monitoring videos to establish a framework for individual surveillance around parked aircraft by proposing a human action recognition (HAR) algorithm. As the focus of this article, the proposed HAR algorithm seamlessly integrates a preprocessing module in which a novel data structure is constructed to introduce spatiotemporal information of the action;a convolutional neural network-based module for spatial feature extraction;a triple-layer convolutional long short-term memory network for temporal feature extraction;and two fully connected layers for classification. Moreover, because no infrared dataset is available for the HAR task on airport grounds at nighttime, we present a dataset called IIAR-30, which consists of eight action categories that frequently occur on airport grounds and 2000 video clips. The experimental results on the IIAR-30 dataset demonstrated that the recognition accuracy of the proposed method was higher than 96%. We also further evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing it with five baselines and four other methods. © 2022 IEEE.

COVID-19 Pandemic vis-à-vis Zamboanga Peninsula Aviation: A Predictive Analysis

The use of time-series analysis to examine aviation data trends through time comes crucial in planning its future. The prophet is an additive model that fits non-linear patterns. It functions best with historical data from various seasons and time series with significant seasonal impacts. This research looked closely into the aviation data in Zamboanga Peninsula, Jolo, and Tawi-Tawi to give a clearer picture of its impact on the sector and forecast passenger and aircraft movement in the coming months to see whether the impact of the opening in the aviation industry can be sustained. The final data comprise 51 data points for flight arrivals and departures and 51 data points for passenger arrivals and departures. Data show the decline in passengers and aircrafts arriving and departing in major airports in Zamboanga Peninsula, Jolo, and Tawi-Tawi during the pandemic. However, an increasing trend was observed years after the pandemic hit the region. Findings during the training and testing phase revealed that different models attained varied results;however, there are models which attained a higher degree of accuracy as depicted in the RMSE and R2. This indicates that predicting passenger and aircraft movement using models with higher accuracy is similar to real data thus, it is viable in predicting future values. Forecasting results further show a gradually increasing trend of aircraft and passenger arrivals in the major airports in Zamboanga Peninsula, Jolo, and Tawi-Tawi despite some observed smaller forecasted values. © 2022 IEEE.

Student Paper: Study of COVID-19 Impact on Aviation Maintenance Training in Indonesia

Globally, the aviation industry including the airlines, maintenance, and manufacturing has faced an unprecedented crisis during the COVID-19 pandemic. Aviation training in Indonesia is no exception in experiencing the pandemic's negative impacts, such as disruptions in aviation training, mental health issues, and economic uncertainty. Teachers were forced to adjust instruction from in-person training to online or hybrid learning. This shift increases much concern, especially on the training effectiveness and the quality of its outcome. Perceptions of instructors need to be examined to gain a clearer understanding of the effectiveness and whether there were positive or negative consequences as well as costs from the aforementioned changes. The researchers of this study conducted seven semi-structured interviews with aviation maintenance instructors in Indonesia to determine the challenges of changing teaching methods during COVID-19. Moreover, a questionnaire was collected from 83 students in four maintenance training programs to investigate the COVID-19 learning method changes in their practical skills as learning outcomes. The Incorporation of Technology (T), Individual (I), Pedagogical (P), and Enabling Condition (EC) or 'TIPEC' Framework and Resilience Engineering Framework will be utilized as the basis to develop the questionnaire and to analyze the results of how the students responded to the new learning method. In the end, this study suggested the most effective teaching methods that can improve practical skilled aviation maintenance professionals in Indonesia during the pandemic situation. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

HAL's indigenous IJT completes Six Turn Spin

The capability to enter and recover from spin is a necessity for a trainer aircraft in order to familiarise the trainee pilot to recognise departure from controlled flight and the actions required to recover from such situations. The spin flights are carried out in good weather conditions with a team of designers, flight test engineers and safety pilot monitoring the various parameters during the flight and therefore time consuming. Subsequent to the temporary halting of flight tests in 2016, HAL undertook major modifications like shifting the vertical tail aft on the airframe and increasing the rudder area and flight testing resumed in April 2019.

Work in Progress: Developing Undergraduate Research Experiences in Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Cybersecurity

During the fall 2020 semester, nine students were recruited to participate in a UAS cybersecurity-focused undergraduate research experience. Three faculty members each identified a small topic area for undergraduate students to pursue. The three areas are: 1. Small UAS (sUAS) Vulnerability and Threat Assessment and Mitigation 2. Effects of Cyber Attacks on Communication in UAS Swarms with Distributed Swarm Control 3. Enhancing Security of Cloud-Connected UAS Services Students were placed onto teams based on their prior course experiences and the project requirements. Common resources were provided for all students to train them in conducting research. Teams were then tasked with developing a more comprehensive research plan for their specific project and carrying out that plan throughout the 2020-2021 academic year. Students completed a pre-survey at the start of the project and a mid-project survey shortly after the winter break. The surveys combined project specific skills questions as well as relevant questions from the Undergraduate Research Student Self-Assessment (URSSA), an NSF-funded assessment tool to measure student gains in research skills. This work-in-progress paper will describe the broader project, the individual student team projects, the research training materials, and some of the results from the pre- and mid-project surveys. Additional discussion will be had regarding the COVID-related precautions implemented by both the institution and the project teams. The purpose of this paper is to provide an example approach for future undergraduate research programs looking for practical approaches to implementing undergraduate research programs, particularly those in the cybersecurity area. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Collegiate Flight Students' Willingness to Pilot in Different Aircraft Sanitization Scenarios

The COVID-19 pandemic has added an entirely new dimension to flight education and training, thus highlighting the importance of understanding student perceptions of training in the close quarters of small, piston aircraft. Schools and institutions across the world have developed cleaning procedures and policies to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 while continuing collegiate programs. Flight schools face a greater challenge relating to the sanitization and the scheduling of an aircraft because social distancing in a light training aircraft is impossible, and an aircraft is particularly challenging to clean because of sensitive equipment and numerous touch surfaces. We used a stratified cluster sample of Part 141 collegiate flight students from the core Aeronautics courses to recruit participants at all levels of training for a questionnaire. Ninety-seven responses were collected. The within-subjects design presented four aircraft sanitization scenarios in a random order to each participant to determine willingness to pilot (Rice et al., 2020) under various sanitization procedures: (1) assignment to an aircraft at random with no sanitization or scheduling procedures, (2) assignment to an aircraft at random with an Instructor who is responsible for the cleaning of the aircraft with alcohol wipes, (3) assignment to an aircraft that is specifically assigned to the same Instructor and his/her students, and (4) assignment to an aircraft that is specifically assigned to the same Instructor and his/her students every day and Instructor who is responsible for the cleaning of the aircraft with alcohol wipes. Sanitization scenarios with more precautions resulted in a higher willingness to pilot measurements.