Evaluation of Alternative Waypoint and Flight Plan Conventions for NextGen En Route Operations

This paper considers four alternative flight plan description conventions for use in the Next Generation Air Transportation (NextGen) program by airline dispatchers and compares each alternative against the current convention. The conventions included are: Fix and Route-based system (Fix/Route, i.e. the current convention), Geodetic Coordinates (GC), Navigation Reference System (NRS), Military Grid Reference System (MGRS), and Point Relation Navigation (PRN). Twenty-one airline dispatchers evaluated the conventions for ease of use, understanding, workload, and acceptability. The results identified the impact each convention had on participant performance, error commission, and user preference, on four tasks chosen to represent current dispatcher work practice. These tasks are more manual than those envisioned for future use, but would form the foundation for any fall-back operation. The study found that the existing Fix/Route convention had the best performance and lowest error rate and severity on the ma...