Comparative Analysis of Remote Tower Controllers and Traditional Physical Tower Controllers Based on Human Ergonomics in China

The purpose of this paper is to establish the safety operation evaluation standard of remote towers and provide reference for the safety evaluation of remote tower technology. From the perspective of human ergonomics, this paper takes the controllers of Qiandaohu General Airport in Jiande, China as an example to compare and analyze whether there are significant differences between the controllers in workload, allocation of attention and situational awareness under two different control modes: remote tower and traditional physical tower. The results showed that Mean HR, SDNN, RMSSD and pNN50 had no significant difference in the time-domain indexes of heart rate variability and total mental load when the controllers of Jiande Airport carried out control and command tasks under two different control modes. There were significant differences in the number of fixation points, the average fixation duration, and the average saccade duration. In the SART scale of situational awareness, there were significant differences in the four dimensions of situational complexity, situational variability, mental arousal, and the quantity of acquired information, while there were no significant differences in the other dimensions and the total score. Therefore, the experimental results measured at Jiande Airport in China validate the validity of the research method used in this paper, and the safety evaluation criteria established provides a reference index measurement method for future studies on remote tower operation safety related to human ergonomics at other airports in China.