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Standard Practice: Color Use in Air Traffic Control System Displays

File Language:
English


Details

  • Alternative Title:
    Color Use in Air Traffic Control System Displays
  • Corporate Creators:
    United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Aviation Administration. Human Factors Division
  • Subject/TRT Terms:
  • Publication/ Report Number:
    FAA-HF-STD-010A
  • DOI:
  • Resource Type:
    Tech Report
  • Geographical Coverage:
    United States
  • Edition:
    24 March 2020 SUPERSEDING FAA-HF-STD-010 1 December 2017
  • Contracting Officer:
    Herschler, Dan
  • Corporate Publisher:
    United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Aviation Administration
  • Abstract:
    This standard is approved for use by all departments of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).1 It provides color-usage requirements and guidelines for air traffic control (ATC) applications that may serve as design requirements for all future ATC acquisitions and upgrades of current systems involving primary displays in tower, terminal, en route, oceanic, and other air traffic operations facilities. It may be extended to auxiliary displays, such as those depicting weather systems and traffic management systems.

    Color has become an integral part of ATC displays as they have evolved from monochromatic radar displays to full-color, complex interfaces that require operators to discriminate, identify, and locate many colors to make effective use of the information displayed. That information must be legible too, regardless of its color. In accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the FAA and the Civil Aerospace Medical Institute (CAMI) screen normal color-vision (NCV) and color-vision deficient (CVD) ATC candidates to determine if their color vision is sufficient to perform mission tasks. The Air Traffic Color Vision Test (ATCOV) was developed by CAMI to determine which CVD candidates have sufficient color vision to complete ATC mission tasks on current ATC systems and to screen out others who do not.

    This standard incorporates a standard color palette that CAMI has developed to fulfill requirements established by the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act (Gildea., Milburn, & Post, 2018; Gildea et al., in press). The colors are specified in terms of their Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage (CIE) normalized luminances and chromaticity coordinates, as well as their corresponding computer-industry standard red, green, and blue (sRGB) values. It provides a standard color set for coding critical information (see definition in Section 3) on non-tower primary ATC displays. The use of sRGB values and related requirements in this standard will facilitate accurate reproduction of the standard color set in the field.

  • Format:
    PDF
  • Collection(s):
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha-512:0c65c36ba18a92b9bb75ea274c7a133156467980986ea8483fff012059fdf912c0c779c89f2d1581da75231ab7a4bf11101cec462b7b5a87bb6f933ab4e836d9
  • Download URL:
  • File Type:
    Filetype[PDF - 1.48 MB ]
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