Delegated separation is an air traffic management capability in which responsibility for separation from one or more aircraft is assigned to the flight crew by an air traffic controller, in specific tactical situations, to improve operational efficiency in the National Airspace System (NAS). In this human-in-the-loop (HITL) simulation, 8 airline pilots flew departure and arrival scenarios while using a cockpit display of traffic information to maintain separation from a lead airplane. Pilots reported that workload for the departure and arrival tasks was well within acceptable limits and that they would be willing to perform this task with the CDTI as implemented in this study. Objective spacing performance showed reduced spacing compared to the baseline condition where controllers retained separation responsibility. The observed baseline and delegated separation spacing distributions were applied to a fast time simulation to estimate the departure throughput benefit that may result from the application of these procedures. The estimated improvement in arrival rate was about 3 per hour for single runway arrivals, and NN about 4 per hour for single runway departures.
Implicationsfor NextGen operational improvement are discussed.
In this paper we describe the use of visual demonstrations (both still images and videos) to aid air traffic control subject matter experts (SMEs) in estimating the required performance characteristics for a surface surveillance system. The demonstrations focused on performance characteristics of location accuracy, orientation accuracy, latency, and update rate. The demonstrations were aimed to increase validity of performance characteristic estimates by allowing SMEs to visualize the consequences in an airport surface context. Still images were created to show the impact of surveillance error for aircraft location and orientation by depicting an opaque aircraft location on a satellite image and using ghost images to depict error. Videos of aircraft moving on and around the airport surface were created to show how surveillance with a specified latency or reduced update rate would appear. These demonstrations influenced the value and variability of performance characteristic estimates, relative to initial discussions without visual demonstrations. The visual demonstrations also increased the consensus and confidence that the team had in the estimates. The distinct advantage of the visual demonstrations is that they elicited performance characteristics estimates that were more valid than simple verbal discussions of values, while being less expensive and faster than full human-in-the-loop simulations.
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