Paper Info
Title
Visual Search in Complex Displays: Factors Affecting Conflict Detection by Air Traffic Controllers.
Abstract
Recent free flight proposals to relax airspace constraints and give greater autonomy to aircraft have raised concerns about their impact on controller performance. Relaxing route and altitude restrictions would reduce the regularity of traffic through individual sectors, possibly impairing controller situation awareness. We examined the impact of this reduced regularity in four visual search experiments that tested controllers' detection of traffic conflicts in the four conditions created by factorial manipulation of fixed routes (present vs, absent) and altitude restrictions (present vs, absent). These four conditions were tested under varying levels of traffic load and conflict geometry (conflict time and conflict angle). Traffic load and conflict geometry showed strong and consistent effects in all experiments. Color coding altitude also substantially improved detection times. In contrast, removing altitude restrictions had only a small negative impact, and removing route restrictions had virtually no negative impact. In some cases conflict detection was actually better without fixed routes. The-implications and limitations of these results for the feasibility of free flight are discussed. Actual or potential applications include providing guidance in the selection of free flight operational concepts.
Year
DOI
Venue
2000
10.1518/001872000779698105
HUMAN FACTORS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
ergonomics,air traffic control,occupational safety,reaction time,injury prevention,human factors,situation awareness,altitude,suicide prevention,visual search,air traffic,regulation
Journal
42
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
0018-7208
16
PageRank 
References 
Authors
5.02
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Roger W. Remington112214.79
James C. Johnston2165.02
Eric Ruthruff3165.70
Miri Gold4165.02
Maria Romera5165.02