Air traffic flow management (TFM) during severe convective weather occurs in a challenging, dynamic decision-making environment, where decisions are often intuitive and based upon actions that have been successful in the past. To improve weather impact mitigation planning, several convective weather decision support tools (DSTs) have been developed and deployed at FAA air traffic control facilities. An impediment that prevents effective operational use of new DSTs is that traffic managers tend to solve problems by attempting to relate the current situation to prior problem scenarios, using only established decision support information that has been incorporated into existing problem solving approaches, rather than considering new DST information. Studies in naturalistic decision-making in difficult situations, such as TFM during severe weather, where the environment requires that high-stakes decisions be made quickly with limited or uncertain information, suggest that DSTs offer significant assistance only after:

(a) users have a thorough understanding of the new DST strengths and weaknesses, as well as the areas of uncertainty associated with tool and the new information,

(b) users have become experienced in recognizing relevant DST cues and decision leverage points, have developed a “mental library” of past situations and actions with the new tool, and can include new DST information when they work out solutions to problems, and

(c) operational users determine that the tool is in fact useful for their decision making, and have an opportunity to provide input/prioritization on DST enhancements.

To meet these goals in as short a time period as possible, we strongly recommend that DST providers and operational TFM decision-makers work together after tool deployment in the field, through interactive training and in situ tool-usage assistance, to ensure that (a) - (c) above are achieved more quickly.

The Corridor Integrated Weather System (CIWS) has been deployed at FAA facilities in the congested northeast quadrant of the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS) to enhance en route TFM efficiency during convective weather. As part of this deployment, MIT Lincoln Laboratory employed an interactive CIWS training program that focused on live training and demonstration sessions in a small-classroom setting, and routine in situ user assistance and tool-use assessment. Through these efforts, traffic managers developed CIWS expertise more quickly than with more conventional training procedures, CIWS enhancements were explicitly driven by operational user needs, and TFM problem-solving using CIWS became largely intuitive — all of which resulted in significant delay reduction and productivity enhancement benefits.

Details of how live training with small user groups and in situ user assistance improved the abilities of traffic managers to use CIWS when devising weather impact mitigation plans will be provided. Examples will be presented showing how repeated CIWS face-to-face refresher training, plus hands-on training and real-time observations by instructors of CIWS usage during convective weather, helped to increase user confidence, which lead to improved TFM decision-making.

Finally, we discuss the 2007 efforts to apply the CIWS training model in support of another convective weather DST, the Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT), in order to quickly build user expertise, reduce DST uncertainty, enhance pattern recognition and identification of relevant cues for departure TFM problem-solving techniques, and to improve inter/intra-facility team decision-making.

This work was sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration under Air Force Contract No. FA8721-05-C-0002. Opinions, interpretations, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the United States Government.