FAA Office of Aerospace Medicine
Civil Aerospace Medical Institute
PUBLICATIONS
AVIATION MEDICINE REPORTS

Report No: DOT/FAA/AM-96/22

Title and Subtitle: A Further Validation of the Practical Color Vision Test for En Route Air Traffic Control Applicants

Report Date: August 1996

Authors: H.W. Mertens, N.J. Milburn, and W.E. Collins

Abstract: The Flight Progress Strips Test (FPST) is currently used for secondary color vision screening of applicants for air traffic control jobs at en route centers. The test provides a practical, job-specific color vision selection criterion involving use of color coding in the most important color task of en route radar contollers, discrimination of the non-redundant color coding in flight progress strips (FPSs). This experiment provides a further, independent validation of the FPST using a new criterion test. Prediction by the FPST of performance on the new and old criterion tests was compared. The pass/fail cutoff score for all tests was "pass with no more than one error." All people with normal color vision passed.

Over all, for participants with both normal and abnormal color vision, the correlations between error scores on the FPST and both criterion tests were greater than r=.93, and error scores tended to increase with degree of color vision deficiency. The validity of the FPST was Kappa=.86 for prediction of performance on the new criterion test, as compared to .91 for prediction of performance on the original criterion test. Part of that small decrease in validity may be because of application of the same pass/fail cutoff score to the new criterion test, which contains a larger number of items than the FPST. The predictive validity of the FPST was shown to be acceptably high in this further validation with a new, independent set of actual flight progress strips as the criterion test.

Key Words: Air Traffic Controllers, Color vision standards, Performance tests, Color vision tests

No. of Pages: 12