Faculty of air transport engineering the department of «air navigation systems»

Team competencies and team qualities
Competencies are the knowledge, skills and attitudes required to perform a task or a job, e.g. en-route ATC. Specific competencies are required to perform this task or job in a team-context, which depend on the nature of team (team size, composition, team stability, etc.) and task (e.g. specificity of the task). In a general sense, i.e. for a wide range of professional settings, Paris et al (2000) provide examples of competencies in each category (i.e. team skills, team knowledge and team attitudes)

Team Competencies Categories	Team Competencies
Team skills (behaviours)	Adaptability, Shared Situation Awareness (SSA), mutual performance monitoring, motivating team members, leadership, mission analysis, communication, decision making, assertiveness, interpersonal co-ordination, conflict resolution.
Team knowledge (cognitions)	Cue strategy associations, task-specific team-mate characteristics, shared task models, team mission, objectives, norms, resources, task sequencing, accurate task models, problem models, team role interaction patterns, knowledge of teamwork skills.
Team attitudes	Motivation, shared vision, team cohesion, mutual trust, collective orientation and (believe in the) importance of teamwork.

To understand the value of these competencies for en-route ATC tasks, it is useful to consider:

- Which team-tasks have to be performed in en-route control? A list of team-tasks is included in Appendix 1. However these tasks must still be considered as general ATC en-route team tasks since the specific tasks may vary from country to country and from unit to unit.
- Under what conditions have these tasks to be performed?
Consider for example, conditions with respect to task-load, weather and serviceability of equipment.
- Does the task require task- or team- specific competencies?
Several different en-route control positions are in operational use. Typically, the
control position is designed for two ATCOs with specific activities and roles, i.e. the
Tactical (or radar) Controller (TC) and the Planner Controller (PC).
The TC is typically in charge of contacting aircraft, giving clearances, providing
aircraft navigational guidance and separations, resolving conflicts and transferring
aircraft to other sectors. The PC is typically in charge of inter-sector co-ordinations,
updating flight information of flights in the sector (integration of new strips on the strip
board) and performing pre-analysis to help the TC
A variety of tools have been developed to aid the PC, TC or both. Some of these
tools have been implemented, some of these tools are still in the test-phase, and
some systems have none of these tools. Examples are:
- Electronic Flight Strips (EFS) / Lists, with additional features such as automatic
sorting, preview of strips to be received from other sectors, colour coding for inand outbound traffic, automatic updates of flight-data, etc.
- Controller Pilot Data Link Communication (CPDLC), in which flight information
and route clearances are exchanged in digital form via radio, such that
conventional (analogue) R/T is required for back-up purposes only (in case of
communication with non-equipped aircraft and in case of emergencies).
- Several tools based on trajectory prediction, such as
- Medium Term Conflict Detection (MTCD), an aid for the PC that predicts
future conflicts up to 20 minutes ahead.
- Aids to monitor the progress of flights in the sector, including flight plan
deviations.
The Integrated Task and Job Analysis (ITA) of en-route ATCOs (ITA, see EATMP,
1999) observed that few tasks of ATCOs are executed independently and that much
of the teamwork is serially structured (i.e. between different ATCOs in the same
sector and between ATCOs in different sectors). This is most prominently apparent
from the sequential handling of (paper) flight strips by the two ATCOs in the sector.
Paris et al (2000) note that serially structuring a team will expose it to the distinct
possibility of system overload, since its performance is determined by the weakest
link in the chain. However, teams in en-route control are often flexible enough to
abandon the seriality in favour of working concurrently on ‘each others’ tasks in order
to relief each other when task load requires.