Air Traffic Management Concept Baseline Definition - The Boeing ...

4.2.3 Human Factors Support For Implementation, Education, And Training
The involvement of human factors should continue beyond the design stage into the
implementation process. There is a tendency to allow modifications to the final design to
be made by the end user to facilitate implementation. This needs to be carefully controlled
by involving human factors and end users together. It is very easy to lose some or much of
the effectiveness of the original design concept through misinformed or uninformed final
design modifications choices which can lead to loss of efficiency, and possibly have safety
implications.
New systems require fully developed implementation plans which include educating the
users on the logic, capabilities, and rationale of the new system operation as well as its
role in the overall ATM system. The operators of a system will tend to look upon changes
in system design as extensions or refinements of current practice and may fail to
understand the need for new and different tasks and procedures to realize productivity and
safety. This need for education and training was one of the main conclusions of the PD1
simulation report (Eurocontrol (1997), PHARE Development simulation 1). The
education process is in addition to the typical training that operators will receive with the
introduction of new equipment or procedures. The baseline data, described earlier in
Section 4.2.1, will be invaluable in supporting the development of the implementation plan
for new equipment and procedures.
Without a positive and proactive education and training program there is likely to be
considerable transfer of old attitudes and working methods, often referred to as negative
transfer. In developing the implementation plan, very careful attention must be paid to the
potential for transfer of habits used to accomplish tasks under the old system which, if
applied with the new system, would seriously compromise efficiency; but more
importantly safety. Such negative transfer is most often evident when operators are under
considerable stress. Again, the baseline database will provide an effective tool in the
identification of potential negative transfer.
4.2.4 Designing To Support Human Performance Across The Entire Range Of
System Operating Conditions
The air traffic domain is comprised of many complex subsystems, it is subject to the
vagaries of the weather, it is also operated by many different individual humans each
having their own slight differences in behavior as well as each being prone to error or
misjudgment. The net effect is a system with many minor disturbances and potential
exceptions, the majority of which never develop into reportable incidents - because of the
influence of the adaptive human being. There are also the rare-normal and abnormal
conditions which develop, but with much less frequency.
It is critical when designing decision support systems to include the capability to explicitly
present to the operator the limits of the system with respect to operating conditions.
The operator cannot be left to guess or assume system status and shortcomings under
specific conditions when asked to step in and perform manually what the system has
heretofore been accomplishing automatically. This issue will be treated in more detail
when discussing the issue of decision support systems in Section 4.3.1.
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