Human Factors of Precision Taxiing under Two Levels of Automation

New air traffic control concepts and automation tools designed to improve the capacity of the National Airspace System are continually researched, including those that test early prototypes and their impact on the operators to adequately perform the task at hand. This study investigated the workload, situation awareness and other human factors issues related to using a prototype surface automation tool (“GoSAFE-Ground Operations Situation Awareness and Efficiency Tool”) for managing precision taxi operations, with increased traffic relative to current day operations. Our team of controller participants working four air traffic positions handled airport traffic using GoSAFE under two different levels of automation: (1) Mixed voice/datalink [partially equipped] and (2) Datalink only [fully equipped]. The study found statistically significant differences on workload due to automation level. The impact of automation was also investigated for the four air traffic control positions. Results on one situation awa...