Research funding to improve aviation safety

The Australian Government Minister for Transport and Regional Services, Warren Truss, recently announced research grants totalling $95,000 for several innovative projects aimed at improving aviation safety.

Truss said the funding has been provided under the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's (ATSB) 2005 Aviation Safety Research Grants Program. "The five successful projects cover a range of issues from potential cockpit enhancements to bird-strike forensics. "The projects reflect the Australian government's commit-ment to improving aviation safety for the fare-paying public," he said.

Grant recipients for the 2005-06 program are:

• Dr Matthew Thomas of the University of South Australia for a project that will investigate the impacts of Australian 'back of clock*' operations on sleep and performance in commercial aviation flight crew; (*Back of clock are late-night departures from Perth for early morning arrivals on the east coast.)
• Dr Maurice Neville of the University of Canberra for a project that will further develop and apply an innovative technique, conversation analysis, for representing and interpreting recorded voice data from aviation accidents. The method could enhance the extraction of meaningful information from aviation voice recordings;
• Dr Stephen Palmisano of the University of Wollongong for a project that will investigate the cognitive processing of visual information, external to the aircraft, that pilots use in judging the landing flare and controlling the speed of its execution;
• Dr Leslie Christidis of The Australian Museum for a project that will investigate forensic DNA identification of birds involved in bird strike occurrences; and
• Associate Prof Kate Stevens of the University of Western Sydney for a project that will study the design and evaluation of auditory icons as informative warning signals in the cockpit.