The ability of protan color defectives to perform color-dependent air traffic control tasks

Air traffic controllers perform a variety of tasks which require them to identify, discriminate and name colors. Qualification standards for this occupation require applicants to have normal color vision. Although the validity of this standard has been questioned, Adams and Tague recently presented evidence in this Journal (1985;62:744-50) that protanopes cannot perform color-dependent air traffic control tasks reliably. In our study, the results of 7 severe and 2 moderate protans are compared to those of 78 normals on a set of tasks which simulated critical tasks performed daily by air traffic controllers. The four tasks included discriminating red from black pencil marks on flight progress strips, color-naming of 1(0) and 0.1(0) discs, and identification of colored line segments embedded in a multi-colored background. The severe protans we tested performed none of the tasks as well as normals. While the performance of the moderate protans was better, statistical conclusions could not be drawn. Our set of tasks bears many similarities to the set used by Adams and Tague and it appears we were trying to answer the same questions. The results of the two studies are similar and the conclusions are the same: severe protans cannot perform color-dependent air traffic control tasks reliably.