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Comment by blue1 | Hacker News Reader

Can you remember the name of this font?

I had misremembered. It's not for air traffic control, but for aircraft cockpits. It's this: https://b612-font.com/

In particular I suspect that the '()' and '[]' glyphs are far more common in source code and terminal use than in cockpits. I found them far, far too similar. Also there's little distinction between 'O' and '0' , and between 'I' and '|'. Other than those problems, it's mostly fine - 'l' and '1' are usefully distinct, for instance - but the friction from those particular difficulties was enough to make me hate it.

Trivia: B-612 is the name of the asteroid home of the Little Prince of the eponymous story. That name is derived from the name of the aircraft flown by author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Saint-Exupéry was a pilot.

Makes sense that a cockpit wouldn't need a clear distinction between brackets and parenthesis, or |. But I am surprised about the similarity of 0 and O. I recall when I went to the ATC academy they really drilled in using a horizontal slash through zeros when hand-written. Also had to underline the letter S in any case where it could be ambiguous with the number 5 (as in a plane's tail number). I think we also had to put a horizontal strike through the letter Z to distinguish it from a 2.

Probably more important in an ATC context than a flight deck setting. Tail numbers come to mind, as you said. Although I could see Part 91 operators mixing up airport identifiers with O and 0, airlines don't fly to airports where that matters... intersections and navaids are all alpha... approach names aren't going to have any ambiguity... so I guess one could argue it's ok? Still, you're right, it was a weird choice not to disambiguate them.

(Also, I'm super jealous you went to the ATC academy. By the time I seriously considered it, I'd aged out.)

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