Analysis of Operational Errors and Workload in Air Traffic Control

Abstract

The Federal Aviation Administration has embarked on a major curriculum redesign effort to improve the training of en route air traffic controllers. Included in this effort was a cognitive task analysis. One component of the task analysis was an analysis of operational errors, to obtain insights into cognitive-perceptual factors contributing to controller decisionmaking error. The data suggest that a failure to maintain situation awareness is the primary cause of controller error. These results highlight the importance of the controller task “maintain situation awareness”, and are consistent with the findings of the other analyses. An approach for training situation awareness skills is presented in relation to models of expertise developed from other analyses: an expert mental model of air traffic control, and a task decomposition listing thirteen primary controller tasks. The findings and training paridigm have implications for training other complex high-performance tasks performed in a real-time, multi-tasking environment.