“Deep Look Inside the Flight Centric” is the first blog of a series providing more detailed insight into flight centric concept. Today, ATCO productivity is introduced in the context of the Flight Centric ATC concept. In the conventionally used sectorized airspace, the capacity of an airspace (sector) is usually dependent on the individual capacity of the controllers responsible for that sector. Although sectors can be both split and merged to avoid overload or underload of controllers, there are limits in either direction. When dividing sectors, it is important to ensure that the smaller sectors are always sufficiently large to allow the controllers to carry out their duties without restrictions and to allow conflict resolution. Merging sectors, on the other hand, is limited by the controllers’ sector ratings and communication coverage. Thus, it is not possible to achieve an even, optimal distribution of the workload across all controllers in a sectorized airspace, meaning that there is always an imbalance in the workload between the individual sectors of one or more area control centers (ACC). As a result, the potential controller capacities are not fully utilized in the current concept.
The Flight Centric ATC concept offers the possibility to eliminate this imbalance while simultaneously reducing the workload a controller has to spend on each individual aircraft, as well as reducing the total number of controllers while maintaining existing traffic volumes. For this purpose, the FCA concept uses three approaches:
- Since the traditional sector boundaries are eliminated with the Flight Centric ATC concept, a new way of allocating aircraft to controllers is required. Instead of rigid allocation based on sector boundaries, innovative distribution mechanisms can be applied with the new concept. Based on workload calculation models which predict the expected workload of each aircraft, as well as the calculation of the current workload of each controller within the FCA airspace, it is possible to achieve a balanced workload distribution. The increased workload of individual controllers, for example due to abnormal situations such as thunderstorm events, can be quickly and easily resolved by re-allocating aircraft.
- The use of new tools, such as the Conflict Detection and Resolution (CD&R) tool, reduces the controller’s workload even in complex traffic situations. While these tools require more interaction with the radar HMI, the workload required to identify complex conflict solutions is reduced. Furthermore, the tasks of the planner controller can be significantly reduced, depending on the size of the Flight Centric ATC airspace, due to the elimination of sector boundaries, coordination with adjacent sectors is reduced. The reduced number of sector transitions also reduces the workload, especially for the executive controller.
When using the FCA concept, airspace control can continue to be carried out by the traditional air traffic control team, consisting of an executive and a planner controller. However, the larger the airspace under consideration, the more sense it makes to reduce the number of planner controllers, since the number of planner tasks decreases proportionally with increasing airspace size. Accordingly, the introduction of new team compositions, such as 1 planner controller responsible for n executive controllers or the use of single person operators, should be considered.