Visual Search in Complex Displays: Factors Affecting Conflict Detection by Air Traffic Controllers

• Published in: Human factors Vol. 42; no. 3; pp. 349 - 366
• Main Authors: Remington, Roger W., Johnston, James C., Ruthruff, Eric, Gold, Miri, Romera, Maria
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 2000; Human Factors and Ergonomics Society; Sage Publications, Inc
• Subjects: air traffic control; Air traffic controllers; Aircraft; Aviation - methods; Biological and medical sciences; Computer Terminals; Data Display; Database searching; decision making; Environmental Monitoring; Ergonomics. Human factors; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Internet/Web search services; Occupational psychology; Online searching; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Risk; Sensitivity and Specificity; situation awareness; Traffic control; United States; User-Computer Interface; Visual discrimination; Visual Perception - physiology; United States; Human; Ergonomics; Visual search; Conflict; Air traffic; Vision; Traffic controller; Perception; Cognition; Detection; Display screen
• ISSN: 0018-7208; 1547-8181
• DOI: 10.1518/001872000779698105

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.