| Summary |
Ze-Ting Chen, 2006.07
Feng Chia University - Graduate Institute of Traffic and Transportation Engineering and Management
Air Traffic Control (ATC) plays an important part on aviation safety. It provides flight information and maintains appropriate separation between aircrafts. Without the assistance of ATC, the flight safety and efficiency might be seriously affected. There are various types of risks related to ATC. In analyzing aviation incidents, it can be found that ATC is one of the major reasons for casing these unsafe events. Although numerous studies regarding ATC risks have been done, most of them only focus on specific topics of ATC without an overall discussion and analysis. Therefore, it would be essential to explore potential risk factors of ATC influncing aviatiom safety,and the relationships among them and then based on these results to propose the measures for risk mitigation.
This study aims to identify the key risk factors of ATC influncing aviatiom safety of our country. Firstly, Based on the previous literatures and the historical aviation incidents, influential risk factors of ATC to aviation safety are defined. The framework of ATC risk factor is formulated with a total of 57 potential risk items, which are further categorized into four aspects, including hardware, software, liveware and environment, respectively. Furthermore, the perspectives of air traffic controllers of our country on these risk items are interviewed by a fuzzy questionnaire. Secondly, this study utilizes fuzzy theory and one technique of structural equation modeling approach, measurement model,to identify the key risk factors of ATC influncing aviatiom safety. Facing the difficulties in dealing with large number of variables, the technique of item analysis is first employed to delete improper items, and then exploratory factor analysis is used to extract several principle components. Then, basing on these extracted principle components, the concept of measurement model is employed to develop ATC potential risk factor framework. At last, the confirmatory factor analysis is utilized to test and verify the proposed model of ATC risk factor.
This study also develops and verifies the relationships between risk factors. The results show that the influncetal ATC risk factors to aviatiom safety of our country can be represented by five principle components, including human errors of ATC, constitutional framework of ATC, ATC system and its interface with human, external factor, and capability and physical conditions of the controllers, which can be represented by 26 key risk factors. The two principle components out of these five components have the most significant effect on ATC, which are constitutional framework of ATC, ATC system and its interface with human, respectively. Besides, we also find the significant and positive relationships among these five principle components. Based on the key risk factors and the relationships identified in each construct, some measures for ameliorating the ATC safety are proposed. |
