Wendy E. MacKay
Abstract
Air traffic control is a complex, safety-critical activity, with well-established and successful work practices. Yet many attempts to automate the existing system have failed because controllers remain attached to a key work artifact: the paper flight strip. This article describes a four-month intensive study of a team of Paris en-route controllers in order to understand their use of paper flight strips. The article also describes a comparison study of eight different control rooms in France and the Netherlands. Our observations have convinced us that we do not know enough to simply get rid of paper strips, nor can we easily replace the physical interaction between controllers and paper strips.These observationshighlight the benefits of strips, including qualities difficult to quantify and replicate in new computer systems. Current thinking offers two basic alternatives: maintaining the existing strips without computer support and bearing the financial cost of limiting the air traffic, or replacing the strips with automated versions, which offer potential benefits in terms of increased efficiency through automation, but unknown risks through radical change of work practices. We conclude with a suggestion for a third alternative: to maintain the physical strips, but turn them into the interface to the computer. This would allow controllers to build directly upon their existing, safe work practices with paper strips, while offering them a gradual path for incorporating new computer-based functions. Augmented paper flight strips allow us to take advantage of uniquely human skills in the physical world, and allows us to leave the user interface and its subsequent evolution in the hands of the people most responsible, the air traffic controllers themselves.
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Index Terms
- Is paper safer? The role of paper flight strips in air traffic control
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Reviews
John J. Hirschfelder
In this fascinating and important paper, the author shows how a chronic failure of people working in traditional disciplines (software engineers, cognitive ergonomists, and sociologists) to understand the workings of a paper-based system have resulted in the design of “paperless” systems that fail to meet the needs of a user community, and are therefore rejected, defeated, or circumvented by the users. The paper is narrowly focused on air traffic control, but the lessons presented apply broadly, even to the office environment. Since shortly after World War II, air traffic controller practices have been based on a combination of observing radar displays and manipulating paper “flight strips” containing both printed data and annotations made by the controllers. Numerous attempts have been made to modernize air traffic control by automating the functions implemented by the paper strips. All have failed, sometimes without the knowledge of the designers or management, who were unaware that the controllers continued to use the old paper system. MacKay reports the results of a four-month study of operations at the Athis-Mons (Paris) air traffic control center, followed by a comparative study of practices at seven other centers in France and the Netherlands. We learn that paper flight strips are an essential medium for social interaction between controllers, fostering cooperation, information interchange, and a system of checks and balances that reduces the error rate. Information is communicated by such actions as handing a strip to another controller, throwing it, placing it in the direct focus view of another controller, placing it in the peripheral vision field of another controller, or manually annotating a strip within sight of another controller. Even background noise generated by the paper system conveys important information to controllers. None of these effects has been achieved by any attempt to automate the handling of information on the strips. The author concludes that using computers to augment the functions of paper flight strips, rather than replacing them, may result in usable enhancements to the current systems.
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