Developing Target Symbicons for the Future Terminal Air Traffic Control Environment

Current air traffic control target symbols are holdover designs developed for obsolete display technology to depict radar surveillance uncertainty. Given new technological capabilities and new surveillance techniques, it is time to reexamine the target symbology for a new generation of air traffic control displays. Symbicons (Smallman, St. John, Oonk, and Cowen, 2001a, 2001b) are a combination of icons and symbols that code meaningful information using simplified visual coding. This assessment focuses on creating and evaluating novel designs for target symbicons for Terminal Radar Approach Control displays while incorporating human factors standards and best practices. In this study, we evaluated different candidate symbicons that conveyed information such as aircraft category and aircraft conformance. We examined the heuristics controllers use that make certain symbicons better candidates to represent different aircraft categories. We discuss the almost universal agreement among the controllers for the tested aircraft conformance symbicons.