Getting the picture: Investigating the mental picture of the air traffic controller

Air traffic controllers have a mental representation of what is happening on the radar screen in front of them, including what has happened, what is probably going to happen, what could happen, and what they would like to happen and are in fact trying to achieve. This representation, whether primarily pictorial in nature or verbal or both, is generally referred to as 'the picture'. Controllers talk of 'having the picture', as a necessary prerequisite for controlling air traffic, and also talk about 'losing the picture' as a rare event in which their abilities to control traffic break down. Future automation may impact upon this picture, and so it is useful to gain an understanding of the picture, what it is and how it works, and what affects it. This paper reports the initial results of a series of interviews with controllers, and insights from a recent experiment, which shed some light on the complexities and potential variations of this mental representation.