Air ground collaboration through delegated separation: Application for departures and arrivals

Abstract

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.

Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Delegation of Separation in NextGen Airspace

“…This correlated with an increase in operator SA, higher ATC reroute acceptability ratings, and lower UAS operator post-sim WL ratings. These findings are consistent with previous findings of manned pilots having a high confidence in using cockpit displays of traffic information (CDTIs) for delegated separation (Domino, Tuomey, Mundra & Smith, 2010;Johnson, Battiste, Delzell, Holland, Belcher & Jordan, 1997).…”

“…Three major levels of delegation have been defined: limited delegation, extended delegation, and full delegation (Zeghal & Hoffman, 2000). The exact tasks and responsibilities associated with delegated separation may vary depending upon airspace type, aircraft type, and phase of flight (Domino, Tuomey, Mundra, & Smith, 2010).…”

C3 in UAS as a Means for Secondary Navigation

“…The large number of navigation systems in today's aircraft have motivated studies regarding the integration and fusion of various legacy navigation sources, where different architectures providing fault tolerance are evaluated (e.g., Baraniello and Corraro, 2010). The MITRE Corporation Center for Advanced Aviation System Development presents results from a human-in-the-loop study of cockpit display of traffic information enabled delegated separation, which is based on the availability in the cockpit of the surrounding traffic information (Domino et al, 2010).…”

“…The MITRE Corporation Center for Advanced Aviation System Development presents results from a human-in-theloop study of cockpit display of traffic information enabled delegated separation, which is based on the availability in the cockpit of the surrounding traffic information (Domino et al, 2010). Table 1 summarises the accuracies in nautical miles (NM) required by ICAO in the latest version of the Performance-Based Navigation (PBN) Manual (ICAO, 2008).…”