Search

The National Airspace System suffers from a reduction in airport throughput or even closure when weather or traffic volume constrains arrival or departure gates to and from the Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facilities. To alleviate this, the Federal Aviation Administration introduced the Integrated Arrival and Departure Control Services (IADCS) concept that would extend terminal separations and procedures to the adjacent Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) sectors for more flexible traffic. It proposes the use of resectorization, bidirectional gates, bidirectional routes, and Air Traffic Control assigned routes. We evaluated them in the human-in-the-loop high-fidelity experiment and collected objective and subjective data. Our results clearly showed that all IADCS procedures except the vertically separated/bidirectional gate procedure were more effective than the Baseline condition that controllers currently use in the field. We conjecture the vertically separated/bidirectional gate procedure requires more complex perceptual and cognitive processes than the other procedures.

In this paper, we report results of a human-in-the-loop simulation experiment that evaluated how Conflict Resolution Advisories (CRA) affected en route air traffic controllers’ performance. Twelve current en route Certified Professional Controllers from Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCCs) participated in the experiment. Results showed that controllers used CRA menus significantly more often than Baseline menus. They also spent more time interacting with the CRA menus than with the Baseline menus. Most of the participants’ subjective ratings favored the CRA, but they also pointed out a few features to be improved.