What's in a scenario?

  • Authors:
  • Peter Wright

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • ACM SIGCHI Bulletin
  • Year:
  • 1992

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Abstract

Robert Campbell's article "Will the real scenario please stand up" comes at an interesting time for me because I have just begun work on a project concerned with HCI issues on the aircraft flight deck and I think I may have come across yet another use of the term 'scenario'. In this domain, the term is used to refer to a detailed and sometimes complex sequences of events. Mission scenarios for example are a detailed specification of a flight plan, a series of aircraft maneuvers and pilot tasks. These can be used to train pilots, or to consider the performance requirements of an aircraft. The term scenario is also used to refer to specific incidents or accidents. So for example, the 'Kegworth Scenario' (Cooper 1990) describes a particular accident that happened to an aircraft in the UK. One of the engines on the aircraft became damaged when a turbofan blade fractured. The pilots, in attempting to contain the fault, shut down one of the engines. What they did not realize at the time was that they had shut down the healthy engine by mistake. Later in the flight they carried out maneuvers for their final approach and the increased load on the damaged engine led it to fail entirely. The pilots were unable to restart the healthy engine they had mistakenly shutdown and the aircraft crashed onto a motorway just short of the runway threshold.