To meet the increasing demands of air traffic, automated systems have been introduced to help air traffic controllers cope with the increasing air traffic in the next two decades. A challenge is that the supervision and evaluation of automated conflict detection and resolution tools have to be performed by human air traffic controllers. These can suffer from vigilance and complacency problems in an extreme supervisory control environment, possibly reducing safety, together with an inability of human controllers to take over when the automation fails. In this study, a form of situation awareness feedback was used to assist controllers in maintaining their task engagement during the supervisory control, and increasing their manual control performance, in the presence of an automation failure. Results from a human-in-the-loop experiment, in which eight participants were instructed to monitor a fully automated air traffic control system and performing manual conflict resolution tasks when the automated system ceased to work, revealed a significant decrease in a workload peak briefly after the automation failure. Although the selected method of asking task-related situation awareness questions to controllers did not necessarily yield improved safety and control efficiency, the results from the experiment suggest that utilizing situation awareness feedback in line with controllers’ attention is an avenue worth exploring further.

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) market is growing, as the field of application becomes increasingly diverse. Various missions performed by UAVs such as transport, surveillance and monitoring missions can be less challenging and more efficient compared to missions carried out by manned aircraft. The new design principle of combining a helicopter and a conventional aircraft has been proven to be prominent, as it allows a UAV to be versatile and have capability of being retrofitted to different mission profiles; these Hybrid UAVs are able to operate at broader conditions, as they can take-off and land without a runway and have a horizontal flight performance of a conventional aircraft.