Ninth USA/Europe Air Traffic Management Research and Development Seminar (ATM2011) CONTROLLER AND PILOT EVALUATION OF A DATALINK-ENABLED TRAJECTORY-BASED OPERATIONS CONCEPT

Abstract—Results are presented for a pilot- and controller-in-the-loop evaluation of a near-term datalink-enabled Trajectory-Based Operations concept with mixed voice and datalink operations. Eleven recently retired Fort Worth Center controllers and twelve current commercial pilots evaluated the concept over 28 hours of simulation time, providing quantitative metrics on controller workload and trajectory efficiency benefits and qualitative feedback on the feasibility of the concept. Eight experimental conditions were tested: four fleet-wide datalink equipage levels ranging from 0 % (voice only) to 80%, along with two levels of traffic density. Feedback on the feasibility of the concept was positive from both pilots and controllers, though off-nominal conditions were not tested. The key objective finding of the evaluation was that controllers issued significantly more time-saving flight plan amendments under the datalink conditions than under the voice-only conditions, amounting to between five and twelve minutes of flying time savings per hour in the six-sector area tested. Statistically significant decreases in controller workload were also measured with increasing datalink equipage level, but this decrease was far smaller than the variation in workload across sectors and traffic density levels. The frequency with which aircraft requests for lateral trajectory changes were approved did not change with datalink equipage level for voice requests, but did increase for datalink requests; however, under all conditions, voice requests were significantly more likely to be approved than datalink requests. Keywords-trajectory based operations, datalink, air traffic control and management, human-in-the-loop simulation I