Effects of data communications failure on air traffic controller sector management effectiveness, situation awareness, and workload

Data communications (datacom) is a tool needed to implement future concepts of air traffic management envisioned by NextGen. A combination of voice and pilotcontroller data communications will allow the National Airspace System to handle 2-3X current day traffic by 2025. The performance, situation awareness, and workload of seven air traffic controllers was analyzed in a medium fidelity, human-in-the-loop simulation with current day traffic levels, where a discrete datacom failure occurred after several trials with completely reliable datacom tools. Results indicate that the datacom failure resulted in decreased sector efficiency, decreased operator situation awareness, and increased operator workload. However, the controllers were likely able to maintain safe sector operations despite the datacom failure. Based on results and feedback by the controllers, it is recommended that NextGen systems provide quickly identifiable notification of a datacom failure, and that future controllers are given experience with adverse conditions in a simulated environment.