Dr. Kevin Jordan's research group has played a major contributory role in a special issue on aircraft maintenance human factors published as Volume 18, Issue 1 of the International Journal of Aviation Psychology. This volume represents four main topic areas including maintenance error baselines, risk and task analysis tools, human factors interventions and technology-based interventions. Co-edited by Barbara Kanki and Alan Hobbs at NASA Ames, this special issue features papers from researchers supported by the NASA Aviation Safety and Security Program including work by Dr. Hobbs, Dr. Manoj Patankar (formerly of SJSU Aviation), Dr. Bonny Parke, Kirsten Patankar, and Dr. Kevin Jordan. This is a quite significant special issue,

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Mr. Vernol Battiste, Senior Research Associate with Professor Kevin Jordan's research group, along with Dr. Walter Johnson, lead of the Ames Flight Deck Display Research Laboratory (FDDRL), were recently interviewed for an article in the March 2008 issue of the American Psychological Association (APA) Online. The article, titled, "Air Travel: The Next Generation," discusses the role of research psychologists at NASA in addressing the growing air traffic congestion problems of the National Air Space. NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, and several related agencies working on the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) project are proposing to give pilots more control of flight-path planning and more sophisticated display designs and automated systems. Dr. Johnson and Mr. Battiste's research examines human roles and responsibilities in proposed systems incorporating advanced automation. "At a time when there will be three times the air traffic-and nine times the work managing it, the ability to maintain a safe separation among airplanes will be increasingly difficult," says Dr. Johnson. An initial NextGen implementation of related advanced flight deck displays and technology supporting merging and spacing is currently being tested by the pilots of UPS (United Parcel Service) and researchers in the Ames Flight Deck Display Research Laboratory.

The article is available at: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2008/03/air_travel.html