WHEELIE - a mobile horizontal display filter to ease controller's separation task

Abstract

In the controlled airspace, safe aircraft separations have to be guaranteed by the responsible controller of the sector. For safe separation the controller has to apply horizontal or vertical separation. Conventional radar displays represent the information in 2 dimensions (2D). With such displays, the horizontal separations between various aircraft are easily perceptible by the human operator. In case the horizontal separation is not guaranteed any more, vertical separation has to be applied. Vertical separation is based on data collected from the secondary surveillance radar (SSR). These SSR data contain the flight altitude information from the aircraft beside other information. The altitude information is expressed in flight levels (FL) as three digit numbers in the second line of the label associated with the aircraft symbol. Therewith the FL information is not exploitable from the controller with the first glance on his operational display system (ODS). For the vertical separation the ATCO (air traffic control operator) has to permanently scan, read, memorize and compare the shown flight level numbers of all tracks under his responsibility. Therewith the controller creates in his mind a mental picture of the traffic situation. This task requires a strong mental effort from the controller. Based on the idea that for a controller applying vertical separation to two aircraft, a priori it is more important to know that these aircraft are flying on different FL, then extracting the real FL numbers from the labels and comparing them. The proposed tool introduces a mobile horizontal filter function to answer quickly with: 'the same' or 'a different' FL. The mobile horizontal filter is moved in the steps of the used flight levels (..., 220, 230, 240, ...) with the wheel of a mouse. The mouse wheel represents a simple and quick way to move the basis of the filter which acts as reference flight level. All aircraft flying the selected reference flight level are displayed graphically to stand out of all other (flying higher or lower) displayed aircraft and can so be identified easily in a first glance. The mobile horizontal filter function moved by the mouse wheel, supports controllers permanent scanning, reading and comparing tasks for the vertical separation. It stimulates controllers to see their actual traffic situation under another aspect.