Abstract
Two main alternatives to managing the future national airspace system have been proposed: Free Flight, in which responsibility for aircraft separation is shifted increasingly to the air, and an extension of the current system of ground-based control with the addition of advanced automation tools. This panel will examine the human factors aspects of these two approaches, focusing on the results of a three-year study carried out by the National Research Council. Free Flight design concepts that assume a high level of airborne authority have more uncertainties than design options involving ground-based authority. The panel will present arguments that ground-based control should add high-level automation for information acquisition, integration, and presentation for aiding controller decision making. High levels of automation are also recommended for automation of decision and action selection for system tasks involving relatively little uncertainty and risk. However, for system tasks associated with greater uncertainty and risk, automation of decision and action selection should not proceed beyond the level of suggesting a preferred decision/action alternative.
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