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Journal Article

Citation

Remington RW, Johnston JC, Ruthruff E, Gold M, Romera M. Hum. Factors 2000; 42(3): 349-366.

Affiliation

NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California 94035, USA. rremington@mail.arc.nasa.gov

Copyright

(Copyright © 2000, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

11132797

Abstract

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.


Language: en

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