Impact of Simultaneous Movements on the Perception of Safety, Workload and Task Difficulty in a Multiple Remote Tower Environment

Abstract

Providing air traffic service to more than one aerodrome is a key concept within Remote Tower. So-called Multiple Remote Tower Operations (MRTO) are expected to be more cost-efficient and user-friendly. On the one hand, their anticipated benefit is to maintain smaller airports that are currently non-profitable due to low traffic numbers, high staffand tower maintenance costs. On the other hand, MTRO offer equally distributed and constant activity for air traffic controllers (ATCOs), with the expectation to lower risks of human error due to boredom or sleepiness at work. However, multiple tasking challenges arise if one ATCO needs to handle traffic at three airports simultaneously. Thus, combinations of visual, audio, vocal and haptic tasks need to be performed for more than just one location. Therefore, this paper addresses the impact of simultaneous movements on perceived safety, workload and task difficulty. Descriptive results show that with the increase of simultaneous movements, providing ATC is perceived as being more efficiency-critical, more demanding in workload and task difficulty increases as well. It was not tested if the differences were significant, since statistical conditions haven't been met. Results show that no situation containing simultaneous movements was perceived as a threat to safety, good workload or the ability to provide ATC. The discussion shows why the impact of simultaneous movements might not only affect MRTO but also single remote or conventional tower environments.

Active Supervision in a Remote Tower Center: Rethinking of a New Position in the ATC Domain

“…Figure 2 shows the experimental set-up in the TowerLab [3] at the Institute of Flight Guidance, German Aerospace Center (DLR). For this study it was assumed that one ATCO can only hold 4 endorsements at a time.…”

“…These concepts enable the air navigation service (ANS) providers to rethink their existing workplaces and role assignments and open up new working positions in the ATC domain. Besides an efficient use of ATCOs, MRTO has a positive influence on the hazard of boredom [2,3]. Even so MRTO have their advantages, Möhlenbrink, Friedrich and Papenfuss [4] claim that one of the major challenges for MRTO is to keep a separate mental picture for each remote-controlled airport and safely switch between those.…”