Controller Response Times to Surface Safety Alerts

Abstract

To ensure that Air Traffic Control Tower-based surface safety systems are designed to appropriately take into account human response time, it is critical to understand controller responses in situations that are within the controller’s operational envelope (i.e., situations that the controller would be expected/trained to handle as part of the job) but that are expected to elicit response times longer than those that would be expected in more typical air traffic control situations. This paper describes the conduct and results of a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) simulation in which participant controllers were exposed to one of two air traffic control situations within the operational envelope and their responses to a surface safety alert were measured. The results of this HITL simulation indicated the right tail-end of controller response behavior (defined as the time it takes a controller to detect the alert, make a decision about how to resolve the situation, and issue corrective instruction to a pilot) as around 13 seconds, which is almost twice as long as was measured in previous studies capturing controller response behavior in typical air traffic control situations.