Development of technical and procedural requirements to support a system of flexible endorsement for upper airspace air traffic controllers

Kurzfassung

A severe shortage of air traffic controllers (ATCO) poses new challenges for air navigation services. They are only allowed to work in sectors where they have received certification including successful on-the-job training. This paper presents a method that makes it possible to aggregate the work experience of control-lers in recent months and assess how efficiently and safely they could organize air traffic in another sector of upper airspace without a full traditional OJT. Rising air traffic volumes coupled with a simultaneous de-cline in qualified applicants for the air traffic controller profession means that some sectors cannot be ade-quately staffed for capacity reasons, particularly in peak seasons with many flight movements. New ATCOs receive a widespread theoretical training, after which they undergo extensive on-the-job training to get a new sector endorsement. After successfully completing this training, they are allowed to work in this sector as a partner in a team consisting of an Executive and a Planner controller. They must complete several months of training in each additional sector or sector group in which they are to be deployed in order to obtain a corresponding endorsement. To maintain these unit endorsements, they must complete regular endorsement maintenance tests and accumulate proven working hours. These requirements would practically mean that every controller is limited to a specific number of sectors, as they would otherwise have to dedicate a ma-jority of their annual working hours exclusively for endorsement maintenance. However, after completing their training and working at own responsibility in a sector, controllers should, in principle, be able to work safely and responsibly in any comparable sector with a much shorter training of a few days, maximum weeks, as most of the needed competencies have already been trained and developed. In order to obtain a metric for the comparability of sectors in connection with the most recent professional experience of a controller, a calculation rule was developed in the SESAR project IFAV3 that allows both the creation of an assessment vector for current experience and the mapping of these experience values to a sector for which a certain volume of traffic is predicted at a defined time. The developed assessment pro-cedure Upper Airspace Skill Level Index (UASLI) now makes it possible to generate an estimate for each ATCO of how well they will cope with the expected traffic in a sector for which they have not received a full traditional on-the-job training. Particular challenges in the assessment are, for example, traffic loads that fluctuate significantly over time or experience gained a long time ago, which must be weighted accordingly in the index. The result is an individual experience-vector consisting of seventeen indices, which can now be compared with an expectation-vector based on the predicted traffic data for a sector and calculated using the same functions. An automated comparison of these vectors provides supervisors with a tool for finding ATCOs with suffi-cient experience and competence who could be deployed in the event of a temporary shortage of ATCOs to any sector. Additionally, IFAV3 also deals with the legal adjustments that would have to be made for the deployment of controllers in non-endorsed sectors. The results of this experience validation presented here, provide valuable insights into the feasibility and potential benefits of a more flexible endorsement system, its impact on the work of air traffic controllers, and contribute to the further development of the upper air-space air traffic control systems.