Delegation of spacing tasks from controllers to flight crew: Impact on controller monitoring tasks

In the present paper, we describe how we investigated jointly the impact of a new procedure for air traffic controllers on active control (i.e. communication and instructions) and on monitoring. In the first section, we will introduce the rationale for looking at monitoring, and more specifically why we decided to use eye tracker devices. In the second section, we will present the method and the experimental set up. In the results section, the impact of delegation to flight crews on the monitoring (modification of fixation areas, scanning patterns, objects of fixation) will be analysed and related to the overall controller activity. Even though the reduced monitoring can be seen as a benefit in terms of workload, the issue of safety will be discussed, in investigating if modified monitoring is still effective.