Pilot User Journey
Background: This team is an essential component of this company’s business model. Each plane, equipped with camera pods outside the fuselage, captures images as they are flown over large areas in a lawnmower fashion. This is how the company obtains and maintains its vast library of images.
Project Duration: 2022
The project outcomes were presented to the executive team in September 2022. Due to the sensitive nature of the findings, this PDF contains a portion of the final deliverable.
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The Problem
There is a yearly cycle of employee turnover due to the pilots wanting to progress in their careers. This team not only spends significant resources hiring and training pilots, but they also lose procedural and institutional knowledge and experience with each lost employee.
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The Goal
To create a stellar pilot experience and identify efficiency gains. We designed a unified system with enhanced usability and tool efficiency by revamping the two legacy platforms into one.
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My Role
As part of a two person research team, I travelled to the Utah operations center to conduct contextual inquiry research. Our research identified improvement opportunities for the pilot training process, procedures, and software usage.
Responsibilities
By spending the week with pilots and support staff, we were able to build rapport and get a full perspective into their work cycle. We were able to gain insights through numerous in-person interactions that couldn’t be achieved through phone/zoom interviews. To accomplish this, we walked through the entire onboarding and daily capture process, looked for friction points and areas to improve the overall pilot experience.
In total, we engaged with 2 members of leadership, 7 pilots and 1 maintenance worker. We attended 10 remote training sessions and participated in 2 working flights where we experienced the capture process first hand. In Dovetail, (system where videos and recordings are collected for research) there were 486 individual tags, in addition to over 8 hours of flight and interview footage recorded. Upon completing the trip, research and results were compiled within dovetail, we created a journey map, and created a detailed workflow.
Images from the Trip
Who Are Our Pilots?
During an onboarding week, we shadowed four pilots. Their backgrounds were all quite different. There was significant diversity in their previous careers ranging from an EMP to an electrician to a sky dive pilot. Their ultimate goals were focused on the commercial airline industry. The pilots’ flight hours ranged between 500 and 610 hours.
You can compare these hours against the 1500 hour commercial threshold that most are trying to achieve. Assuming pilots earn 400-700 hours per year, this company can expect to have them of staff for only 1-2 seasons before they move on. A requirement of the 1500 hour rule is to have 50 hours of multi-engine time. Pilots need to achieve this if they intend to fly for commercial airlines. As it can be expensive to fly a multi-engine, the opportunity to earn those hours at this company is unique.
Pilot Onboarding Process
During the onboarding process, pilots are inundated with 9 different software programs in their first week, many having separate login processes and credentials.
The most significant piece of feedback received relating to the onboarding process is how overwhelming this firehose of information is. While that can be the nature of onboarding for any job, there are changes that can be made to make the entire process easier and more straightforward allowing pilots to focus on learning flight critical material rather than how to use software.
Workflow
A detailed workflow was created of what a typical day looks like when the pilot captures images. There are four stages; preparation, pre flight, flight, and post flight. The pilot gets prepared for a day of flying at the hangar as needed. Next, the pilots run through the pre-flight checklist and ready the aircraft for image capture. During flight, pilots follow the provided flight plan and complete image capture. Back on the ground, they log relevant details about the flight/aircraft and forward the image drives for processing. Each of these steps provided insights and opportunities for improvement.
Three Themes for Areas of Improvement
After analyzing interviews and observations from the week, three themes for areas of improvement emerged:
The first was pilot experience. This is where enhancing specific elements around their experience during their limited time with this company helps build the company’s reputation in the aviation world as a desirable place for pilots to build flight hours.
The second is onboarding and training. Changes can be made to reduce pilot frustration and training costs so they can start doing revenue-generating flights sooner.
Lastly, we have tool usability – investigating how we can make the software and equipment pilots use more efficient.
Below is an example of the recommendations we provided to the executive team.
Next Steps
The next step is working with the team to prioritize and implement some of these improvement opportunities with eventual follow up with the pilots to discuss their experience post changes.
Phase one recommendations include: completing a survey of the current fleet instrumentation, investigating additional cold-weather gear, and further evaluating the usability for key pilot reporting tools.
