Crew Role in CNS-ATM Cyber Security: Cyber Readiness of Air Traffic Controllers

Recent aviation incidents show modern CNS-ATM systems are vulnerable to not only unintentional threats, but also cyberattacks. Navigational system integrity and availability violations have surprised crew and degraded aircraft safety margins. An important problem in this context is to assess the impact of cyberattacks on crew situational awareness and decision making and enhance the overall cyber-physical resilience of next-generation air traffic control systems. However, pilots and air traffic controllers lack cyber security awareness, education, and training today, especially those that can place them in operational scenarios involving malicious effects of cyberattacks. This paper bridges this knowledge gap and contributes an experimental study assessing how cyberattacks impact air traffic controllers and help crew become cyber-aware and cyber-ready. 28 subjects participated as controllers and experienced cyberattack scenarios in a training lab setup resembling a real-world operational environment. Our results show that cyberattacks negatively impact controller workload and airspace safety and that cyber security awareness can help controllers perform better when subject to cyberattacks. While prior works examine CNS-ATM cyberattacks in flight simulator settings for pilot reactions, our focus on air traffic controllers is novel. We also discuss the implications of our findings for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) and Uncrewed Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM).