Impact of Simultaneous Movements on the Perception of Safety, Workload and Task Difficulty in a Multiple Remote Tower Environment

Providing air traffic service to more than one aerodrome is a key concept within Remote Tower. So-called Multiple Remote Tower Operations (MRTO) are expected to be more cost-efficient and user-friendly. On the one hand, their anticipated benefit is to maintain smaller airports that are currently non-profitable due to low traffic numbers, high staff-and tower maintenance costs. On the other hand, MTRO offer equally distributed and constant activity for air traffic controllers (ATCOs), with the expectation to lower risks of human error due to boredom or sleepiness at work. However, multiple tasking challenges arise if one ATCO needs to handle traffic at three airports simultaneously. Thus, combinations of visual, audio, vocal and haptic tasks need to be performed for more than just one location. Therefore, this paper addresses the impact of simultaneous movements on perceived safety, workload and task difficulty. Descriptive results show that with the increase of simultaneous movements, providing ATC is perceived as being more efficiency-critical, more demanding in workload and task difficulty increases as well. It was not tested if the differences were significant, since statistical conditions have not been met. Results show that no situation containing simultaneous movements was perceived as a threat to safety, good workload or the ability to provide ATC. The discussion shows why the impact of simultaneous movements might not only affect MRTO but also single remote or conventional tower environments.