Changing the role of the air traffic controller: How will free flight affect memory for spatial events?

Background Sound Impairs Interruption Recovery in Dynamic Task Situations: Procedural Conflict?

“…In laboratory‐based tasks, the assumption is that following interruption all resources are available for interruption recovery, but this might not be the case in many complex, real‐world C2 environments in which the impact of a given interruption may be influenced by other external factors. Although the task was not conducted in a real naval or air traffic control setting, the immersive environment of the microworld provides a valid approximation using non‐experts that is likely to show similar effects (e.g., Nicholls et al, ; Parise, Imbert, Marais, & Alonso, ). Further research would be needed to determine if the importance of attention in interruption recovery was unique to dynamic tasks (due to higher task demands, more aspects to re‐encode, and environmental changes affecting the use of associative cues), or whether it would also play a key role in recovery from static tasks.…”

Human Factors Measurement for Future Air Traffic Control Systems

“…However, proposed enhancements based on dynamically adjusting airspace sector boundaries will pose challenges to ATCOs' ability to build and/or maintain situation awareness (SA; Hauland, 2008;Nicholls et al, 2007) and will undoubtedly change workload levels (Kaber, Perry, Segall, & Sheik-Nainar, 2007;Loft, Sanderson, Neal, & Mooij, 2007;Miller & Parasuraman, 2007;Ruigrok & Hoekstra, 2007;Sharples et al, 2007;Willems & Koros, 2007). Futhermore, automation-related issues of trust, complacency (Felici, 2007;Gordon, Kirwan, & Perrin, 2007;Sharples et al, 2007;Subotic, Ochieng, & Straeter, 2007), and overreliance will become increasingly important because of the escalating commitment to automation in future ATM systems.…”

“…Endsley (1995) defines SA as "the perception of elements in an environment, within a volume of space and time, and comprehension of their meaning and projection of their status in the near future" (p. 36). Researchers (Endsley, 1997;Nicholls et al, 2007) have expressed concerns about the extent to which automation may degrade the picture or potentially even remove it from the human controller altogether (Kirwan, 2001). The various effects of TB operations (e.g., "free flight") and increased automation on the SA (and resultant performance) of controllers have been well documented in the literature (Endsley, 1997;Endsley & Rodgers, 1998;Kaber & Endsley, 2004;Kaber, Onal, & Endsley, 2000;Kaber, Perry, Segall, McClernon, & Prinzel, 2006;Nicholls et al, 2007;Sharples et al, 2007).…”

Solution Space Based Analysis of the Difficulty of Aircraft Merging Tasks

“…Although more and more aspects of air transportation are being automated, the task of supervising air traffic is still performed by human controllers and is therefore limited by human performance constraints [4]. With the growth of air traffic volume, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to predict the effect of developments in the air traffic management system on the ATCo [5,6].…”