Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Europe Chapter 2013 Annual Conference

Approach air traffic controllers provide safe guidance of aircraft approaching an airport from different arrival routes. Handling traffic and preventing separation loss between aircraft requires controllers to maintain situation awareness at all times. In case an incident is foreseen, guidance options must be acquired to deal with it. Though expert controllers are expected to always come up immediately with the best guidance options, option generation skills have often been neglected in situation awareness research so far. In addition, the fact that incidents still happen in air traffic control shows the need for research in this field. In an initial investigation study, seven expert air traffic controllers completed an online-survey consisting of videos and screenshots captured from three real-time simulations of approach scenarios on Düsseldorf airport, Germany. Every scenario was designed to end in separation loss of two aircraft. In each scenario, subjects were asked to provide as many options as possible to deal with the situation one minute prior to the incident. Results showed differences between experts regarding the quality and quantity of options successfully preventing separation loss given in the scenarios, indicating different strategies of dealing with conflict situations among subjects.