How many more close calls will it take for us to significantly overhaul the ATC system and bring it into the present century? Or is a large scale disaster the only way to make people understand the urgency?
Yes. And a controller is going to get scapegoated (likely ruining their life) when a few hundred people die in the process, versus the failing system.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/business/air-traffic-cont... | https://archive.today/bFcAh
(Obviously, I would rather be wrong about this)
No, you're right, this is a common procedure across industries
This is happening frequently to pilots and cabin crew as well, all over the world. Regulators have allowed a lot of flex in rostering in recent years, maybe a bit too much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_runway_disaster
Obviously it would be ideal if such changes are made before planes collide, but the US air accident investigation system generally does its job, as far as I've heard.
Human ATC operators integrate a huge variety of information including voice comms to build a situational awareness of not just the current position and velocities of planes, but also their stated intentions.
Yes, with sufficient coordination you could push all of that over into the cockpit and have the pilots input their intentions directly. We all know that voice transcription is a bit hit and miss (though the phraselogy used would probably be quite helpful), and certainly typing is... not optimal for emergencies.
This aligns with basically all questions about automation in aviation (including in the cockpit). Automated systems can generally out perform human operators in probably the 99.99+% of typical cases. However a human with full situational awareness is still critical in the remaining situations. The challenge is that:
* For a human to have proper awareness, they must be meaningfully engaged. They must actually be having some real agency and effect on the system.
* Neither full human nor full automation provides the degree of safety and performance that we currently desire. Somehow we must integrate the two systems together.
This worldview, commonly espoused by Silicon Valley types, that every problem is just one iphone app away from being solved, is nauseating.
There are so many corner cases you cannot even imagine! Special requests. Weather. Emergencies.
Even further, many of these problems do not lie solely with ATC. They also involve humans, piloting the airplanes.
They're apparently installed according to this PDF: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/rwsl/media/JFK.pd...
In this case, planes coming from 04R (per the article) were crossing 04L. All the normal crossings of 04L I see in this PDF are equipped with the lights.
So what went wrong?
However, overhauling the current system because it is incapable of handling the future where autonomous vehicles flood the skies, now that is something I can get behind.
Until cars can drive themselves without crashing into stopped fire trucks[1], I don’t want anything autonomous flying anywhere near where I live.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tesla-driver-killed-plo...
Close calls are a very important signal for how safe the system is.
Good safety systems are redundant and require many failures to result in a crash. Here, we got down to the last link in the chain: weather was clear and the departing pilots could see there was an obvious problem while there was time to stop.
> since the one in place is incredibly safe with many years of statistics to prove it.
We've gotten to this safe system by chipping away at problems we see-- both from actual accidents and close calls. The only way we reach and keep (and perhaps surpass) this level of safety is to keep (carefully) correcting problems.
(And yes, there is risk of changes making things worse. We need to do our best to avoid that and detect it quickly if it happens).
It's a giant red flag in any serious OSHA system in resource mining, energy extraction, military logistics, etc.
In order to reduce fatal accidents close attention is paid to the full incident pyramid, minor accidents and near misses.
Fiftty years of practice about the globe strongly makes the case that a reduction in near misses and non fatal incidents has a real flow on to reducing fatal accidents.
> the one in place is incredibly safe with many years of statistics to prove it.
Achieved via exactly the kind of OSHA attention to small details and near misses system just outlined.
The safety officers at New York and elsewhere will be failing at their job if they are not putting some the hours in to looking at this incident and how to mitigate future occurrences .. especially when visibility is lower than on this day.
Arguing that the system is safe and doesn't need an overhaul is not the same thing as arguing that the system should start ignoring things.
iterative change is a part of the system, self reflection and pivoting to address issues as they first appear to avoid future consequences is very much how these things should work.