Preparing for the Future of Collaborative Air Traffic Management

One of the key areas identified in the NextGen Concept of Operations focuses on Collaborative Air Traffic Management (CATM). Within the NextGen Concept of Operations, this collaboration is expected to continue to occur in a highly distributed environment where operational staff are distributed across many locations and organizations, including flight operations centers, pilots, the Air Traffic Control Systems Command Center, Enroute Centers, TRACONs and Airport ATC Towers (or their future functional equivalents). Significant changes can be expected, however, due to the introduction of new decision support technologies which will enable different approaches to traffic management. These changes in CATM require careful consideration of human factors issues at many different levels, ranging from strategies for distributing roles and responsibilities among different people and technologies, to the design of sensing, communication and decision support technologies and the associated human-computer interfaces, to the training of new procedures and the tools that support them. In this context, this paper focuses on two issues: • What operational concepts for CATM are likely to be developed over the next 10-15 years? • What human factors issues need to be considered in the design and implementation of these new operational concepts