Future en route air traffic control workstation: back to basics

The expected increase of air traffic by at least 33% by 2015 to 2020 requires more than an evolutionary change from the way air traffic controllers work today in more than an evolutionary manner. One way to do this is to free up individual air traffic controller physical and mental resources. If controllers can apply the increase in available resources to air traffic control, we expect that they have more capacity to absorb an increase in air traffic. To make these resources available we use human factors principles to integrate available data and provide that data to controllers in an efficient presentation format. We report on the development of a concept software platform that integrates data obtained from existing automation tools with available National Airspace System (NAS) data. The integration takes place at the human computer interface and attempts to make that interface easy to use by applying human factors principles and leveraging existing air traffic controller expertise. We discuss why we must present National Airspace data in an integrated manner. We also present how we intend to assess if our approach has succeeded in freeing individual air traffic controller resources.