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SAFESOUND is a project sponsored by European Commission's GROWTH program (GRD1 2001). SAFESOUND aims at improving safety during aircraft's ground and flight operation by means of enhanced audio functionalities. Project's enhanced audio functionalities are 'Direct Vice Input' (DVI), 'Direct Voice Output' (DVO) and distance speech capture. DVI (speech recognition) and DVO (speech synthesis, 3D audio) have already been evaluated and proven their advantages in the military aircraft environment. Distance speech capture is already implemented in high end cars.
This R&D project is a collaboration of important European firms and organisations:
- Alitalia S.P.A. (Italy);
- AKG Acoustics GmbH (Austria);
- Airbus France (France);
- EEC - Eurocontrol Experimental Centre (France);
- NLR - National Aerospace Laboratory (The Netherlands);
- RISOE National Laboratory (Denmark);
- Thales Avionics S.A. (France); and
- TNO - Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (The Netherlands).
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The Consortium leader is Thales Avionics S.A.. The project started May 2002 and has a foreseen lifecycle of three years. The consortium will develop new or adapt existing technology to the specific requirements of commercial aircrafts with a strong focus on proven safety gains, end user acceptability and certificability. The 'human factor' guided development will be evaluated in a full fight simulator.
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The SAFESOUND consortium is convinced that a large number of cockpit tasks could benefit from enhanced audio functionality. A potential realisation of enhanced audio functionality for some of these tasks would not fulfil all of SAFESOUND's fundamental requirements: safety gain, end user acceptability and certificability.
With a huge questionnaire the consortium enquired therefore end user acceptability from pilots with different background (captain, pilot, test-pilot, examinator). Based on these results a working-group selected target application to be developed and evaluated by the SAFESOUND project.
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SAFESOUND is based on the hypothesis, that enhanced audio functionalities are able to improve commercial aircraft handling during ground and flight operation significantly. The project partners will define and develop a mock-up and evaluate it in a full-flight-simulator. The expertise and experience of the participants will guarantee the portability of the simulation result.
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SAFESOUND follows a human-centred approach, by collecting operational requirements related to existing scenarios and future ATM scenarios, by performing extensive human factors studies, and by validating the proposed concepts in a full-flight simulator. Three partners in the consortium will provide crew members ( test pilots and operational crews), who will guarantee the operational significance of activities all along the project.
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SAFESOUND is a European project (8 partners from 5 countries) with an impotent contribution of the EC and its added value contributes so to EU policies:
- federate contributors at this European level;
- transport and employment policies will be positively impacted; and
- tackling certification issues will allow industries to be in phase with upcoming rules.
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The SAFESOUND project aims at improving safety and operational integration of CNS functions in the civil cockpit, multiplying the benefits of the CNS/ATM solutions that have been defined at the European level to answer the need for increasing the airspace capacity.
Results will be disseminated to European industries involved in other aerospace market segments (e.g. Dassault FALCON for business-jets), so that economic growth generated by SAFESOUND is maximised and support European industries global competition.
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Horst
Hering
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SAFESOUND Project Manager
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