Factors affecting air traffic controller’s weather dissemination to pilots

As the number of flights in the United States continues to rise steadily, an equally amplified need for reliability and safety has come to the forefront of aviation research. One of the most alarming trends is the number of general aviation (GA) accidents during severe weather events that occur yearly, with fatalities occurring in more than half...

A History of the Air Traffic Control Collegiate Training Initiative (AT-CTI) Program

In the 1989 FAA Flight Plan for Training, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) proposed testing the concept of off-loading some portion of air traffic control specialist (ATCS) training to colleges and universities. This was the genesis of the program that became known as the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative (AT-CTI). The AT-CTI...

What is safety data?

This paper reports on our efforts to determine if the ubiquitous term safety data can be more specifically defined. That is, whether data can be categorized as safety data based on some unique characteristics such that other data not having these would be categorized as not safety data. FAA analysts rely on multiple sources of objective data for...