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Environmental Support for Older and Younger Pilots' Comprehension of Air Traffic Control Information

¹ Institute of Aviation and the Beckman Institute
⁴ Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
² Department Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.
³ Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire, Durham.
⁵ Independent consultant, Manchester, NH.

Address correspondence to Daniel Morrow, University of Illinois Institute of Aviation, Aviation Human Factors Division, Willard Airport, #1 Airport Road, Savoy, IL 61874. E-mail: dgm{at}uiuc.edu

We investigated whether expertise mitigates age differences on pilot communication tasks when experts rely on environmental support. Pilots and nonpilots listened to air traffic control messages describing a route through an airspace, during which they referred to a chart of the airspace. The routes were high (waypoint routes anchored to navigational reference points on the chart) or low (vector routes that were not) in contextual support. Participants read back messages and answered questions about aircraft position (which required integration of message and chart information) or altitude (which did not). Pilots more accurately answered questions. The expertise advantage for position, but not altitude, questions was greater for waypoint routes, showing differential use of environmental support by experts. Age did not moderate these effects.