What will change? skills for future Air Traffic Controllers

A few weeks ago I was asked to present at one of the closing events of a project aiming at defining “… future knowledge, skills and competences required by key professionals of the aeronautical sector. By identifying the needs of an evolving labour market, skill-UP develops initial and continuing VET training programmes based on suitable and innovative teaching and training methodologies and on study pathways for skilling, upskilling and reskilling the air transport workforce.” The project is called skill-UP and you can find more here: https://www.skillup-air.eu/

I was asked to consider the future Air Traffic Controller skill set. I took current competence areas and skills and the way we feel the future is going in terms of service expectation, technology and societal trends as a starting point to try to look into the crystal ball and see how this future skill set for air traffic controllers could look like.

I came up with 5 areas which admittedly are not all necessarily skills but are a mix of skill, knowledge and attitudes (known as KSAs) that I believe would be necessary for the future.

The 5 KSAs for me are:

  • Digital competence (K)
  • Cognitive Flexibility (S)
  • Maintenance of current ATCO skills that lead to cognitive processes: Spatial Intelligence, Situational Awareness and Decision Making with possibly alternative exposure to practice. (S)
  • Continuous Development (A)
  • Discipline (A)

With digital competence I mean that a future air traffic controller will need to appreciate how artificial intelligence (not in the strict sense of AI but in a generic sense of a non-human support/co responsibility in decision making and other processes) works, its strengths and weaknesses not dissimilar to how we inherently learn on how to work with other people and to get a feel of their strengths and limitations.

With cognitive flexibility I mean that skill to be able to switch from one thing to another and also to go from 0 to 100 in a split second. This skill is already important now but if future air traffic controllers will be put in montoring situations, then we will need to fill in the gaps more rapidly than we perhaps do today.

Future air traffic controllers will still need to take decisions on aircraft flying in 3 dimensions, in order to provide a safe and efficient service. This needs a number of skills to be developed and maintained. Currently controllers mainly maintain these skills by practicing. If practicing becomes less available, because of the delegation of certain elements of work to an automated system, then we will need to find an alternative way on how to maintain these skills – (apart from the fact that as a system we need to acknowledge skill degradation and have mitigations for these that do not expect super being skills from human air traffic controllers – but that is the subject of an other article)

I included continuous development because I think that the job of a controller will be changing rapidly in the future. If future controllers do not endorse the attitude that they need to keep learning and to move with things, then we will have a mismatch in pace.

Finally, I also included discipline as an attitude. One may say that discipline is important to date and I would perfectly agree. However whereas in the present there are still windows which allow one to work in their own bubble and do “what they like and how they like” within a set of prescribed rules and regulations, the trend is towards sharing of information and collaborative decision making, between humans and between humans and machines. The discipline comes in where it will become more important to do the right thing, but in the way it fits with the rest of a shared system rather than in isolation. Working well with others, vs working alone requires discipline. Tomorrow´s air traffic control work will probably require even more of that.

These are my thoughts about the future skill sets of air traffic controllers. 

I end by sharing the presentation I gave (click on the picture to go to the pdf).

What do you think? Send me a private message or start a healthy debate. I´ll be happy to answer and to contribute!

Instructor Booster workshops – Now also online.

A few years ago, I was contacted by an ATC academy with a request to help them with a number of objectives which included:

  • forging a stronger instructor´ team,
  • go beyond the minimum knowledge required (usually the instructor endorsement and classroom instructions techniques) and
  • to reflect on best-fit training delivery methods.

I then set out to create a workshop with these objectives in mind.

Now, we are fours years down the line, with eight of such workshops delivered to four European ATC schools. Five further workshops are already planned for between the end of this year and 2021.

The workshops are a mixture of facilitated sessions and presentations in which we go through a simple, but effective, model that says that to consider learning we need to consider 4 areas: Who, What, How and By Whom.

The who is the student, who has a need to learn, the What is the subject matter – or content, the How is the methodology and methods used and the By Whom is, of course, us the instructors/teachers/coaches.

We go through a reflective path to consider all these elements as the basic ingredients that make up a plate. One can say that there are as many learning experiences as there are plates and the trick is to dose the basic ingredients right. However, as anyone who has attempted a little bit of cooking knows, before dosing an ingredient, one needs to know what it tastes like and what effect it´s presence (or absence) and quantity will produce in the plate.

The results help those attending, who range from instructors to training managers and those responsible for training development to reflect about the fit of the learning experience to the ingredients they have: the type of students and the subject matter. It helps them think on whether adjustments to the methodology and methods are necessary and finally to determine their own needs to be an integral part of the recipe.

The feedback received is very positive. We step down the hamster wheel called routine (no wonder that in many languages routine (from road) and wheel are related) and start reflecting on what is working and what can be improved. We come out of the workshop with insight into our work and our needs as instructors. We also come out with concrete ideas on how and where to make adjustments.

This year brought a new challenge: These workshops were until now held in a face to face set up with a lot of team exercises and dynamics. With restrictions in meeting and in travelling, we had to take a decision to either postpone the planned workshops, and lose good time when actually reflection and change COULD take place, or find another solution. We decided to go online. We had to consider the number of participants and also most of the exercises and the dynamics in which they are done. The first such workshop took place a week ago with very good results!

As for me, each workshop is a learning experience. I do provide my ideas through the presentations and also challenge the status quo. I also learn a lot, from the day to day examples, from the insight that my fellow instructors provide and also come out energised ready to do more to improve the learning experience in our business!

Supporting ATC students during COVID pandemic – Ingenav´s experience

At the beginning of April, we put up announcements on Linked-in and Facebook offering help with theory and or radar techniques to students who had their training interrupted because of the COVID pandemic. This help would be delivered for free as part of our initiative to help our sector in times of need.

Surprisingly for us, only a few students contacted us for help and they needed reinforcement in practical skills training.

During the months of April and May, we remotely delivered Approach and En-Route Surveillance skills training using PORT – ROSE Simulation Online ATC Simulator platform and our own exercises. Our instructors ran over 50 exercises with these students, adapted to their level of proficiency and helping them to maintain the skills they had learned already in their schools and to learn certain new ones.

From our side, we learned better how to deliver skills training remotely. We have learned that whereas face to face contact and feedback helps in certain cases, it is not necessary 100% of the time. A blend of presential and remote/online skills training is possible. We learned that briefings and debriefings are perfectly possible in an online space and that today the technology to execute and remotely monitor a student during simulation is perfectly possible and highly performant.

From the feedback we received at the end of these sessions, we see that the students, apart from being very appreciative of the gesture, they valued the following in particular:

  • The fact that someone else was giving a parallel and fresh viewpoint on problem-solving and radar skills, that complemented that which was thought in their school.
  • They could experiment outside of their official school program. Experimentation included: different separation techniques (vectors, vertical with rates of climb/descent, etc. ), coordination techniques, analysis of aircraft performance within the decision-making process, coordination, approaches including ILS and visual approaches.
  • Students did not find not having face-to-face interaction with the instruction a hindrance to their development.
  • The empathy and availability of the instructor during these difficult times was what they were looking for.
  • The possibility to continue practising radar skills and to avoid or at least reduce skill degradation.

In conclusion, offering free ATC training during the COVID pandemic has been a very positive experience for us at Ingenav, and from the feedback, we received a positive experience for the students who participated. Large amounts of ATC practical training can be done remotely. The technology permits it and the methodology fits well. We are considering repeating this at a later stage!

Automation and Human Centricity – Three-tier human centricity. Position paper.

There should be little doubt or argument that the journey towards further automation in Air Traffic Control is well on its way and is set to continue. Also, there is little doubt that many of the future solutions will have, at least, some of their components based on Artificial Intelligence techniques.

If we look at SESAR´s Level of Automation Taxonomy (LOAT) model as displayed below,  

most modern ATC Systems are somewhere between B4/B5: High level – full automation support of information analysis and C1: Artefact-supported Decision Making.

The end goal for most R&D projects is to arrive to D8: Full automation of action sequence execution for all ATC tasks.

This raises a few items to consider and this is what we at Ingenav think about this:

  1. Until D8 is reached on all ATC tasks (whether it will be desirable for it to be reached is the subject of item 2), humans will be part of the system and the system will need to be Human-Centric.
  2. It is questionable whether, even if technologically possible, it would be desirable to reach D8 and have a non-human-in-the-system ATC chain.

Developing these items, a little further we need to consider:

  1. A three-tier Human-Centric approach is necessary:

Human-Centricity needs to be seen holistically:

The design of an ATC system needs to be done through a human-centric approach. The result, i.e. the ATC system itself needs to be human-centric. And with the growing autonomy coming about, one shall not forget that the end-user of ATC is not the air traffic controller but the airspace user: the human who flies the aircraft. These are the three tiers – from the design, to the product itself, to its output.

Starting from Tier 3: Human-Centric design:

The design of an ATC system shall be led by its usability and by its interaction with the holistic system first. Rather than having a technology-led design in which the “what can be done” is defined first and the “how” is done later, human-centric design requires agile development cycles between definition – prototyping – human in the system testing – adjustments – redefinition and advancements. The design team needs to incorporate from a very early stage operational expertise that understands the business and the process and that co-lead the design. This should be the case even when the functionalities that are being developed would be in the high Ds in accordance with LOAT as these will always interact with other processes where the human is involved.

Tier 2: Human-Centric system:

The result of the design – i.e. the product, needs to fully integrate the human as part of the system and not its operator or the mortar which glues together the imperfections created by the other parts. A Human-Centric system understands how the human works and integrates the human´s processes into the overall system. Principles such as relevance, timeliness, prioritized and rationalized for human understanding should be key in all the interactions of a human-centric system.

Tier 1: Human-Centric outputs:

It may sound obvious but it is often taken for granted: an ATC system acts as an intermediate; it is a safety net and an efficiency boost to air traffic and airspace users (that is the objective of ATC!). It is airspace users who execute the instructions generated by ATC. Until further notice, aircraft will be flown by humans. The instructions provided by ATC need to keep that in mind. So far, this has been taken for granted because the human-in-the-system at the ATC level automatically made the adjustment. However, in a scenario where some of the instructions are not generated by a human, the system has to keep in mind they will be executed by one.

It is important to insist on Human-Centricity and the human-in-the-system principle and not to see the human as an external agent who acts as an operator or a mediator, or even worse as a corrector of imperfections. It is important to take the learnings we have made in the past decades and build on them rather than to try to discard them because we believe that advanced automation will make the human somehow less important.

Question 2: is it desirable to arrive to D8?

The quick answer to this is that we don´t know. To date, we do not have the maturity to understand what a fully autonomous system, which in turn is an intermediate between vigilance and execution, would mean. The gap to get there is still too big and we need to narrow this gap in order to understand better the ramifications. Of the ramifications, we are able to identify to date one can include resilience, of such a system and degraded modes, interconnectiblity, responsibility, certification, the holistic concept of operations of the airspace user and societal (is it, in fact, desirable and productive from a societal perspective to try to eliminate the human from the system?).

R&D in this area must continue and needs to be holistic and not just technology-driven. We can do a lot of things but should we apply them? By continuing R&D, the sector will mature further and whilst bridging the gap, we will also understand the opportunities and the threats that such changes would bring. If we ever reach D8, it should be an evolution and not a revolution.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, work is in progress towards advanced automation in the lines of decision-making support and basic autonomous execution of tasks. Human-Centricity is primordial in the development of such tools and this human-centricity needs to be taken care of in 3-tiers: at design, at the system and at output levels. Achieving D8: full automation of task execution for all tasks making up ATC should be an R&D goal and not an operational one at this stage. The gap between the current paradigm and that one is too wide and we do not have the maturity to understand the ramifications of such a change. R&D needs to be holistic and not just technology-driven. A stepwise approach towards understanding will be necessary.

 

PS Ingenav is currently participating in a project with a Core European ANSP and ATC system manufacturer to introduce Decision Support Operational ATC tools using amongst other historical data and machine learning principles. In this project, a 3-tier Human-Centric approach is being applied.