Impact of the Frequency of Lost Links on Air Traffic Controllers’ Performance and Acceptability Ratings

A human-in-the-loop simulation was conducted to determine the effect of the frequency of loss link declarations on air traffic controllers’ sector performance and their acceptability ratings of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations. We used a short versus long transaction expiration time (TET) to derive the number of lost links in a condition, with the shorter TET resulting in twice as many lost link declarations compared to the long TET. We found that long TET conditions led to better performance than the short TET conditions. Moreover, controllers preferred the long TETs compared to the short ones.