Impact of delegation of spacing tasks on safety issues [ATC]

Today´s challenge in the domain of air traffic control is to maintain if not improved the level of safety considering the foreseen increase of traffic. Among the different options investigated, a new task allocation between air and ground to manage aircraft spacing is seen as part of a possible solution. Beyond assessing the impact of this new task allocation (denoted delegation) on controller and flight crew activities, it is essential to understand how the overall level of safety is impacted. In this paper, we suggest that safety assessment requires a dual approach, measuring not only the negative dimension of safety (error free) but also the positive one (error tolerant). In the first section, we introduce current safety approaches and describe our safety related hypothesis. In the second section, we describe our experimental method, in terms of experimental plan and set-up. After the discussion on the method in the third section, remaining questions and foreseen follow-up are listed in the conclusion.