Abstract
Visual motion and other visual cues are used by tower controllers to provide important support for their control tasks at and near airports. These cues are particularly important for anticipated separation. Some of them, which we call visual features, have been identified from structured interviews and discussions with 24 active air traffic controllers or supervisors. The visual information that these features provide has been analyzed with respect to possible ways it could be presented at a remote tower that does not allow a direct view of the airport. Two types of remote towers are possible. One could be based on a plan-view, map-like computer-generated display of the airport and its immediate surroundings. An alternative would present a composited perspective view of the airport and its surroundings, possibly provided by an array of radially mounted cameras positioned at the airport in lieu of a tower. An initial more detailed analysis of one of the specific landing cues identified by the controllers, landing deceleration, is provided as a basis for evaluating how controllers might detect and use it. Understanding other such cues will help identify the information that may be degraded or lost in a remote or virtual tower not located at the airport. Some initial suggestions on how some of the lost visual information may be presented in displays are mentioned. Many of the cues considered involve visual motion, though some important static cues are also discussed.
This chapter is based on a previously published internal NASA report: Ellis SR, Liston D (2011) Static and motion-based visual features used by airport tower controllers: some implications for the design of remote or virtual towers. NASA/TM—2011–216427, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA and on the conference publication (Ellis and Liston 2010)
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Notes
- 1.
Personal communication, ATCO, San Francisco International Airport, 7/7/2006
- 2.
Personal communication, tower supervisor, Stockholm Arlanda International Airport, 4/23/2007
- 3.
Visual motion is defined as the angular rate of change of the line of sight angle to an aircraft from the tower.
- 4.
The project is called Concurrent Validation of AT-SAT for Tower Controller Hiring (CoVATCH). AT-SAT stands for Air Traffic Selection and Training test battery.
- 5.
During normal vision, people make from 3 to 5 fixations per second (Rayner and Castelhano 2007). However, when studying some aspect of an ATC image, fixation duration can increase but rarely grow longer than approximately 1.3 s (e.g., Remington et al. 2004). Consequently, a reasonable constraint for modeling the duration of a controller’s glance would be to insure that they are 1.3 s or less.
- 6.
The aircrafts’ deceleration was recorded just after touchdown using an arm rest-stabilized iPhone in airplane mode running an application called Motion Data with sampling rates at 30 Hz.
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Acknowledgments
FAA Interagency Agreement DTFAWA-09-x-80029 to NASA and the NASA Airspace Systems Program (SAIE) provided support for the reported work. We also wish to thank the anonymous controllers and supervisors who participated in interviews and discussions.
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Ellis, S.R., Liston, D.B. (2016). Visual Features Used by Airport Tower Controllers: Some Implications for the Design of Remote or Virtual Towers. In: Fürstenau, N. (eds) Virtual and Remote Control Tower. Research Topics in Aerospace. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28719-5_2
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