By the end of World War II, the airplane had proven its power as an efficient transporter of goods and people, and as a devastating bringer of bombs. Thus in the postwar years, the control of airspace became an increasingly pressing concern, especially in the United States as American airlines expanded their fleets of high-speed jets, the US Air Force flew ever more sorties for surveillance and training, and in the resulting melee, horrific mid-air collisions became more frequent. Improving the nation's systems for controlling airspace naturally became a task for engineers, who extended the radar, navigation, and computing technologies developed during the war to semi-automate what had largely been a manual system of air traffic surveillance. More surprisingly perhaps, improving air traffic control was also a growing concern for psychologists, specifically those who had created the US military's procedures for selecting and training military pilots, navigators, radar operators, gunners, and other agents of air warfare. These psychologists, who called themselves “human engineers” or “engineering psychologists,” had during the war insinuated themselves into the R&D laboratories of the nation's military-industrial complex by offering engineers their hard-won expertise on the psychological limitations of human operators of high-technology military equipment.

The US's emerging system of air traffic control proved to be a valuable research subject for human engineers looking to prove the mettle of their emerging field, which they, borrowing the systems language of engineers, called “man-machine systems psychology." They argued that resolving the nation's air traffic control problems would depend on how well teams of men were integrated with networks of equipment for communication, command and control; and how well these men could work as a team in such a demanding, hyper-technological environment. To prove their point, these psychologists conducted field studies of air surveillance stations, and also elaborate laboratory-based simulations of crews performing the tasks of air traffic control. This paper will show how the problems and potentials of air traffic control shaped the psychology of man-machine systems, and in turn how this emerging field of human science hastened the implementation of the semi-automated technologies that enabled the massive expansion of American air traffic in the postwar.