Static Sector Characteristics and Operational Errors

A study was conducted to determine if static sector characteristics are related to the occurrence of operational errors (OEs) at the Indianapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center (ZID). The data consisted of a three-year sample of OEs that had occurred in ZID airspace. Sectors were treated as the unit of analysis (n=40). The static characteristics included: a number of major airports, cubic volume in nautical miles, sector strata, number of shelves, number of VORTACs, number of satellite airports, and number of intersections. Pearson correlations revealed that cubic volume in nm (r = -.31, p = .049) and sector strata (r = -.31, p = .049) were significantly correlated with the number of OEs. The static sector characteristics were entered into a regression procedure as predictors with the number of OEs as the criterion. The regression analysis produced a model containing cubic volume in nautical miles, number of major airports, and sector strata as significant predictors. This model accounted for 43% of the variance in OEs (R = .65). No other static sector characteristics were significant predictors of OE incidence in this sample. The correlation between cubic volume in nautical miles and number of OEs indicated that, as sector size decreased, the number of OEs increased. However, the predictive utility of cubic volume in nm may be due to underlying dynamic traffic characteristics inherent in different-sized sectors, rather than a direct relationship between sector size and incidence of OEs. This relationship needs to be explored in future research. The regression analysis suggests that static sector characteristics can account for some of the variance in OE occurrence in ZID airspace and, thus, can increase our understanding of the factors that lead to an OE.