Culture Implications on Future Work Design—New Technologies and Collaborations for Controllers and Pilots

Abstract

Air Traffic Control, ATC, has evolved gradually during the 20th century technology, law and culture have been developed and introduced into aviation in such a way that the aviation community in Europe now appears like a patchwork consisting of virtually hundreds of different and fragmented parts. Current harmonisation work such as the European Single Sky initiative may be seen as a reaction to this (European Commission, 1999). In the decade to come aeronautics will face large challenges when capacity limits will be reached because of ever increasing traffic. New technology is now gradually being introduced in order to meet these challenges (Eurocontrol, 1998). In future aviation system pilots and air-traffic controllers will have new roles, responsibilities and ways of collaboration. The context for pilots and controllers work is very different, yet they are complementary actors in a common system. The two groups have different professional cultures and will be part of a common change. This paper consolidate recent research from Air Traffic Control, Flight Operations and Maintenance on issues such as organisational culture, safety culture, implementing major organizational change and a new human factors model. It is suggested that the consolidated research may be applied to and facilitate future changes in their joint system due to the many similarities and differences between flight operations (FO) and air traffic control (ATC) that exist. One conclusion is that the overall implication for future work design between controllers and pilots is not only cultural. It is necessary to develop theoretically sound practice that can create new organisational processes which are functionally effective for all stakeholders and which then provide the basis for a new collective understanding of how the system can work (McDonald, 2009) and go from there. Further research should be focused on discussing the relevance for developing a common process model with training modules for crosslearning and develop a common reporting system to feed common risk models and performance measures.

QC 20120222

HILAS