ABSTRACT
Supervisors and colleagues keep a watchful eye on inexperienced controllers, provide help and guidance where it is needed, give encouragement when it is due, and ensure that inexperience never hazards safety. The controller develops air traffic control skills, becomes better at scheduling and prioritizing tasks, and learns to cope with higher task demands. The workload of a controller can be increased greatly by an adjacent inexperienced and untrusted colleague, for the controller does his or her own work but also feels obliged to watch everything that the colleague does. Among the most frequently claimed effects of the air traffic control system on the individual controller is the induction of stress. Measures of air traffic control workload may be of systems, behaviour, performance or error, may be physical, physiological or biochemical, may be individual or social, may be subjective or objective, and may address many cognitive functions.
