Contact Declan Saunders
Areas of expertise
- Human Factors
- Safety, Resilience, Risk & Reliability
Background
Declan is an established researcher at Cranfield University in the field of Human-Centric design and digital aviation systems. He has worked with multi-disciplined partners to design and evaluate human-machine interfaces (HMI) for reduced pilot workload and hydrogen-powered flight decks with Rolls-Royce, and AI large Language Models (LLMs) for causal accident investigation with the Taiwanese Transportation Safety Board. Declan has published a number of journal and papers in conferences in these respective fields of research.
Research opportunities
Areas of interest for research include:
Pilot Fatigue assessment
Eye tracking for Future Flight Deck Design
AI modelling and future accident investigation capability
Publications
Articles In Journals
- Saunders D, Blundell J, Li W-C, Beecroft P, Lu L, .... (2026). Principles for ‘intelligent assistant’ systems in future flight deck design: autonomous action integration to reduce pilot workload. The Aeronautical Journal
- Li W-C, Amanzadeh H, Blundell J, Saunders D & Beecroft P. (2026). Potential risks of developing commercial hydrogen-powered aircraft: lessons learned from individual contributing factors to system failures in hydrogen occurrences. International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, 236
- Saunders D, Li W-C & Wang T. (2025). From Turing Test to Chinese Room Argument: how to apply artificial intelligence in aviation. Transportation Research Procedia, 88