Paper-Pushing Flight Controllers See Future in Canada's System | Hacker News Reader

Paper-Pushing Flight Controllers See Future in Canada's System

bloomberg.com

50 pointsrhayabusa17 comments

>The two technology chiefs attribute NAV CANADA’s ability to adopt new technology to several factors. They have involved controllers throughout the process, which helps with design and testing. If an off-the-shelf product exists that meets their needs, they don’t bother building it in-house. And they work on manageable, small improvements rather than the moon-shot projects that are typical for air-traffic providers.

>“We don’t take too big a bite,” Koslow said. “We do it incrementally.”

So, by following standard software development best practices, they avoid the massive failures that characterize large government contracts. Who'd have thunk it?

> U.S. debate to privitize air-traffic control spotlights Canada

Heaven forbid, we would pay the Canadians for what they have that is already proven to work well and efficiently...

It works well for them. Keep in mind the US has thousands of more airports and significantly more air traffic. Just like in the tech world something might work for 100 users of an app but may not work at scale. I am not bashing the NAV Canada system just saying the comparisons to the US ATC aren't apples to apples for numerous reasons.

I think, the guys who built the system for a 100 airports probably know best how to change the system for a 1000 airports while preserving all its advantages.

Maybe NavCanada can slowly scale up by exporting it to bigger and bigger countries until its big enough for American airports.

Note with respect to scalability you're only asking for one order of magnitude. Technologically we've advanced far more than one order of magnitude in the 15 years they've been developing the system, so we NIH'd it and started development here, there should be no technological limit.

from wiki, canada:

> Nav Canada manages 12 million aircraft movements a year for 40,000 customers in over 18 million square kilometres, making it the world’s second-largest air navigation service provider (ANSP) by traffic volume

usa:

> In 2006 En Route and Oceanic Services supported 47 million operations in the national airspace system. We are responsible for controlling more than 5,600,000 square miles (15,000,000 km2) of airspace in the U.S. and more than 24,600,000 square miles (64,000,000 km2) of airspace over the oceans.

roughly 1/4 the volume, I'm willing hazard a guess it would scale.

It seems the US can't learn anything from anywhere in the world because it's too big, too many states, too small (in comparison to China) or for some other reason.

Your words not mine. I said nothing about learning and only about making comparisons.

Sorry, I didn't want to attack you. I just notice that whenever something works in another country (see healthcare or public infrastructure) a lot of people in the US will say it can't work in the US: Either the US is too big or it's a "socialist" thing and therefore needs to be avoided.

I think this attitude is a big danger for the US. There was a time when the US could teach the world but that time is coming to an end. Other countries have learned whatever advantages the US system has and now they are building on that knowledge and they are sometimes coming up with better solutions. If the US keeps ignoring these developments it will slowly fall behind until it's too late.

No worries. I agree completely that the US can learn plenty from other countries regardless of size on tons of topics. I was just trying to point out the typical over simplification/comparisons that news articles tend to make about technical things especially aviation.

>> Heaven forbid, we would pay the Canadians for what they have that is already proven to work well and efficiently...

Yep. Came here to suggest that. The problem is the old system is surely being maintained by someone and a purchase of a new system will mean less spending in some congress persons district. This is an explanation of course, not a justification.

Everything listed in the article is actually already used by the FAA. Paper strips went away about 10 years ago in ATC centers and more recently in towers [0]. FAA has ADS-B for satellite-based navigation over Alaska and is deploying it elsewhere (notably oceanic regions) [1][2]. Digital communication ("text messaging") is coming to towers [3] and variants of it have existed for years in control centers for certain aircraft.

Check out https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/ for lots of info on their improvement efforts.

None of this is to say the FAA is perfect--it's not, but it's definitely improving and they have an immensely difficult problem to manage. The FAA handles a much larger traffic volume than Canada, including many of the most congested regions in the world. (Planes are not evenly distributed!) The Advanced Automation System was the wrong approach, trying to overhaul the entire system at once, and NextGen is successfully taking the incremental approach.

[0] https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/snapshots/stories/?slide=37 [1] https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/programs/adsb/ [2] https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/snapshots/stories/?slide=26 [3] https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/update/progress_and_plans/data_c...

Tokyo Haneda, one of the world's busiest airports, still uses paper strips, by choice. They like the explicit handoff of passing a strip to another controller. Here's a human factors study from France on that subject.[1]

[1] http://www.atmseminar.org/seminarcontent/seminar4/papers/p_0...

Are you able to explain what this paper strip system is and what it's for?

The link above has an explanation. For a simpler version, see this video, which is at the beginning of a Japanese drama about enroute air traffic control.[1] Note that the towers use paper strips, but enroute and area control use screens with images of strips. This is all about who has responsibility for the aircraft right now.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX4WB_VlD88

Woah. A great system for drones to start self-reporting flight plans into .

Does anyone have first hand information about this system? It looks too good to be true. Not even a problem with it.

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