A Study on the Operational Impact of Abnormal Aircraft in ATC Operations (Focusing on Situation Awareness and Workload)

Due to the lack of navigable airspace caused by worldwide air traffic increases, air traffic control(ATC) services are becoming more complex, which results in the increase of aircraft accidents. To cope with these challenges, major aviation institutes abroad are actively conducting research regarding the human factors affecting controllers but as of late, no such specialized activities have been found in Korea. Due to the dynamic attributes of ATC operations, management of controller's situation awareness(SA) and workload, and knowledge on the impact of abnormal aircraft to controllers are very important. Furthermore, using actual flight data of each country will lead to valuable results, because individually, it has different airspace characteristics and air traffic volumes. This study assumed that air traffic difficulties would affect the controller's SA and workload. To testify the above hypothesis, the abnormal air traffic situations are simulated by using ATC simulator. The findings indicated that the effect of traffic situations containing abnormal aircraft on the controller's SA and workload, it led to demand increase and supply decrease in SA, and increased mental demand, temporal demand, effort and mean workload score in the workload.