Analysis of the roles of pilots and controllers in the resilience of air traffic management

The objective of this paper is to show how qualitative resilience analysis approaches can be effectively structured for large sets of disturbances and strategies for work-as-done at the sharp end of a complex sociotechnical system. This is pursued by studying the roles of air traffic controllers and airline pilots in dealing with a wide set of disturbances in current air traffic operations. Disturbances are events or conditions that may affect one or more components or processes of the ATM system and thereby perturb air traffic operations. A set of 459 disturbances are clustered at three abstraction levels and characterised with respect to frequency of occurrence. Strategies of pilots and controllers for dealing with these disturbances are identified, and these strategies are also clustered at three hierarchical levels. The strategies are analysed with respect to key characteristics, such as detection and interpretation of the disturbances, coordination about the strategy, and strategy acquirement. The effects of the strategies on the key performance areas (KPAs) safety, capacity, environment and cost-efficiency are characterised and ranked. The results show that the strategies for dealing with disturbances have positive safety implications for the majority of disturbances and negligible safety effects for the remaining cases. The effects on the other KPAs are negligible in the majority of cases, but they are negative for a variety of disturbances. The results emphasize the important roles of pilots and controllers for dealing resiliently with disturbances in ATM.