Article on Aviation Psychology and Applied Human Factors published

Our article on the topic Challenges of Multiple Airport Control, which we co-authored with Nora Wittbrodt by Fraport AG, has been published in the current issue of Aviation Psychology and Applied Human Factors. In this article, we report on an experiment we conducted within the framework of the VICTOR project (project VICTOR). In this laboratory experiment, we studied the effects of a new operational concept on the performance of 20 test subjects working on a task similar to typical air-traffic controller activities. Using simplified airfields, subjects had to grant approvals, survey the situation and discover interfering signals. We varied the number of monitored airfields and the control principle, i.e. the simultaneous control of one or more aircraft, in a parallel task paradigm. While the delegation of clearances worked very well in all conditions, the perceived strain increased with the number of monitored airports, while increasingly fewer transient signals were discovered. Surprisingly, more disturbances were discovered when several aircraft had to be handled simultaneously.