Comparing Situation Awareness Measurement Techniques in a Low Fidelity Air Traffic Control Simulation

Changes to the National Airspace System will occur as part of the Next Generation Air Transport System. The consequences of these changes on the situation awareness of pilots and air traffic controllers need to be identified. Before situation awareness metrics can be deployed towards this goal, metrics that can unambiguously capture baseline levels of situation awareness in the current day National Airspace System must be developed. Towards the ends of developing such a measure we investigated the usefulness of three existing measures of situation awareness, a subjective technique, an offline probe technique, and an online probe technique, in predicting performance on a low fidelity air traffic control simulation. Existing situation awareness metrics demonstrated a capacity to predict performance metrics relating to airspace safety, but none were able to effectively predict important elements of airspace efficiency, viz. enroute and handoff delay. In some cases, the subjective technique and online probe technique interacted with a measure of workload.