Abstract: Free flight is a proposal for future air traffic management. Previous studies showed that it would have negative effects on air traffic controllers’ conflict detection performance and proposed the introduction of conflict alerts as a solution. These studies focused on individual properties of conflict alerts such as modality, reliability, and look-ahead time, and found different effects of modality and reliability of conflict alerts on controllers’ performance compared to those found in traditional automation research. To clarify these differences and to provide effective guidance for the design of conflict alerts, future studies should investigate the effects of property-integrated conflict alerts on controllers’ performance and should include conflict resolution tasks in their experiments.

Key words: free flight, conflict alerts, conflict detection, conflict resolution, air traffic management