ABSTRACT
En-Route Air Traffic Control (ATC) rooms contain mainly sector control suites. A sector may have up to six geographically adjacent sectors in three-dimensional airspace. En-route ATC is of particular interest to the ergonomist because the design of control rooms is, or should be, determined by the requirements of the operators, rather than by physical constraints, such as the need to see where aircraft are on the surface of an airfield. An “en-route” ATC centre is, physically, a large room, in which teams of controllers maintain a round-the-clock traffic control service. By 1971, simulations of planned systems did not normally use horizontal displays, although they were still used for the “dummy” sectors, probably due to a shortage of vertical displays. An exploratory simulation for the Karlsruhe centre in 1975, which simulated only one sector, employed an in-line organisation, involving nine working positions.
