ABSTRACT
The capacity of an airport can be halved during poor visibility conditions if the airport allows simultaneous approaches only during visual conditions. Several concepts are defining new standards, procedures and operations to allow simultaneous operations during poor weather conditions. However, all the concepts assume that the controllers pair the aircraft and align them for simultaneous approaches, but there are no decision support tools that aid them in this process. This study investigates different levels of automation for pairing and aligning aircraft and evaluates the role of the air traffic controller while interfacing with the tool. In all the conditions the goal was to deliver a pair of aircraft with a temporal separation of 15 s (+/-lOs error) at a "coupling" point that is about 12 nmi from the mnway threshold. The logical pairing of aircraft is completed much earlier than the physical pairing of the aircraft that occurs at the coupling point. Four levels of automation were selected that ranged from no automation, to full automation suggesting optimal pair assignments. The metrics in this paper describe the highlights of what has been analyzed and include number of pairs made under different conditions, number of pairs broken and controlled as a single aircraft to prevent potential loss of separation, and excessive workload. It was found that the
controllers pair aircraft differently from the pamng algorithm. Also the area coordinator responsible for creating aircraft pairings experienced higher workload than the sector controllers, suggesting that the roles of the controllers, when using this automation need further refinement.
