CSULB Leads NASA Air Traffic Study
Long Beach Gazette 2/1/07
CSULB began working on the project — titled Metrics for Operator Situation Awareness, Workload, and Performance in Automated Separation Assurance Systems — last October. The study is part of the 2025 Next Generation Air Traffic System (NGATS).
“The goal is to increase the number of airplanes in the sky at any one time,” said Tom Strybel, CSULB psychology professor and co-investigator for the NASA project.
Strybel and his team — consisting of another professor and several grad students — are tasked with studying how pilots and air traffic controllers operate under increased air traffic conditions. NASA gave the university a $3 million, four-year grant to lead a group of institutions in the project, including California State University, Northridge, the NASA Ames Research Center in San Jose, Purdue University and San Jose State University.
Specifically, the project’s goal is to find out whether a new air traffic system with more planes in the sky can be efficient and still safe. Strybel and his team are analyzing how new automation technologies would affect the “situation awareness” of pilots and air traffic controllers.
Situation awareness refers to the pilots’ and air traffic controllers’ awareness of information in their immediate environment, and their ability to make good predictions and anticipate future events, Strybel explained. Pilots call it “being ahead of the aircraft.” Air traffic controllers call it “having the picture.”
Currently, airplanes must have a minimum separation distance of three to five miles horizontally and 1,000-3,000 feet vertically, depending on the air space, Strybel said.
One of the new (Global Positioning System) GPS-type technologies would allow pilots to locate other aircrafts and broadcast their own positions to other planes and to air traffic control towers. This would transfer some of the air traffic controllers’ responsibilities (and workload) to pilots.
In terms of how tripling air traffic might affect the size of airports, especially small ones like the Long Beach Airport, Strybel said he could not comment, since his project focuses on the impacts on pilots and controllers once a plane is up in the sky.
He said NASA has another, ongoing project titled TRACON, which studies the impacts of increased air traffic on airports.
“I don’t know if three times an increase is possible,” Strybel said. “But that’s an empirical question É we want to investigate that, we want to come up with tools to say this is possible.”
The CSULB team is using its lab, the Center for the Study of Advanced Aeronautic Technologies, to perform simulations. It has 23 workstations and other equipment worth about $250,000 donated by the Boeing Company and NASA Ames, according to Strybel.
Pilots and air traffic controllers use the computer stations to virtually fly through an air space and test new automation technologies. The high-tech lab is also on a network with the other universities and institutions collaborating on the project, allowing participants to be in the simulations together. Strybel said his team is almost done preparing the first simulation and will perform it soon.
“It’s been hectic and exciting,” he said of the project so far. “Communicating across many organizations is challenging. But it’s been a lot of fun, too.”