I could type more, but it would be a long and boring story.
There is mismanagement.
There is also a misallocation and underfunding of essential services and infrastructure. This is the excuse for ever more funding.
If we were building our aviation infrastructure from scratch starting today, you would get some really strange looks if you suggested employing humans to manage air traffic.
Don't you?
Airplanes have gotten increasingly automated. Who is responsible when Airbus' excellent automations that have prevented countless upsets and accidents fail? Nobody, if it was an honest mistake, and lessons learned are applied to improve even further.
The problem with modern ATC is that a lot of the safety systems are bolted and backported on top of existing extremely legacy tech. Ffs, the communications still happen over radio where transmissions are missed if more than one person talks at the same time. And people have died because of this, as well as controllers making a mistake or pilots and controllers misunderstanding each other.
There's no reason to continue bolting more stuff on top. A very large part of ATC can be fully automated and made safer.
AM is obviously not the way a "CSMA/CD" system would be designed today, but it does get the job done, and has for a long time.
A lot of fatalities have been avoided thanks to a pilot overhearing ATC giving takeoff or landing clearance to another plane, but quite a few incidents could also have been avoided if plane cockpits had a big red light "authorized to enter runway" which could only be turned on by ATC. In an industry which is designed around so many redundant systems, it's rather astonishing that an error in a single communication channel can lead to disaster.
Arrival/departure/ground ATC has to deal with much more complex traffic, emergency situations and edge cases in general. Technologically, we're nowhere near fully automating this.
ATC is a solved problem. Nothing is going to happen that hasn't happened before, or otherwise can't be anticipated. There's nothing about ATC that inherently demands human involvement in real time.
- Plane loses radio communication on final approach and ignores go-around orders, lands on occupied runway as ATC gets others out of the way [1]
- Guy steals a plane and takes off without permission [2]
- Someone left some cones on a runway at JFK [3]
- Door blows off aircraft [4]
- Some dude runs across the runways [5]
- Pregnant woman giving birth on flight [6]
- Student pilot freaks out, ATC calms her down and gets her instructor on frequency [7]
- Earthquake [8]
- Pilot hits a deer [9]
- Bomb threat on board, pilots decide to evacuate on the tarmac after no help arrives in ~1h [10]
Some situations have probably happened before, somewhere. Some others are completely new. I would highly recommend that you watch these videos (they're all relatively short) and genuinely ask yourself whether our current state-of-the-art AI models would be able to successfully handle these situations in the short timeframe required to do so. Let alone the fact that by AI we mean text models, so I'm not sure how they would integrate with terrain information, real-time radar data, arrival/departure routes, etc.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what control towers do. They're not there to simply observe planes do their thing and intervene if they get too close. They actively handle the traffic, and this task requires human pattern recognition and cross-domain reasoning skills in a matter of seconds, and the technology to replace this is simply not there yet. If you still disagree, I'd love to learn which technologies you'd apply to this problem and how they would compose with each other in order to achieve the same outcomes as in the cases I linked.
Of course, this is not to say that ATC shouldn't be made safer and more automated wherever possible. Particularly in the US, where equipment is severely outdated and some dubious regulations allow their ATCs to handle runways and give clearances in a way that would not be allowed in Europe and have already resulted in more than a few close calls. These are all valid concerns, but IMO they can't be extrapolated to "all ATC services can and should be automated".
I fly often, and I for one feel safer (at least, with our current technology) knowing that there are humans in the cockpit and in the control tower who can react and take control when unexpected stuff happens.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXNWwKx9c1o
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LLmF9tZoEE
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmywjMQDbos
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ma0JzO43Ig
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZviKoEKAaw
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pZ3VOPlarw
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgc2Wh4cOgo
[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o80cNJ_XhX0
Trivially handled by video game-grade AI. Is an aircraft somewhere it's not supposed to be, or doing something it's not supposed to be doing (most likely because a human has screwed up somewhere?) Route everything else out of the area, signal authorities. Human intervention not required.
Guy steals a plane and takes off without permission [2]
See above. What can ATC possibly do about this, besides alert other aircraft to the situation and signal law enforcement?
- Someone left some cones on a runway at JFK [3]
Foreign object detected or reported on runway, an everyday occurrence. Alert other aircraft and facilities personnel. What else is the controller going to do, go downstairs and pick up the cone?
Door blows off aircraft [4]
What is the controller supposed to do about this, other than accept the crew's request for an emergency landing and (guess what) route everybody else out of their way?
Some dude runs across the runways [5]
Like other 'surprises', two-legged FOD might have surprised the Wright brothers, but that's about it. Alert law enforcement and warn aircraft.
Pregnant woman giving birth on flight [6]
Just another routine 'surprise' covered by standard procedure. Handled primarily by the air crew rather than ATC. Handle emergency landing permission if requested by crew, alert medical personnel to meet the aircraft when it lands, done deal.
Student pilot freaks out, ATC calms her down and gets her instructor on frequency [7]
Honestly not sure what should be done to automate this kind of situation. I suppose an LLM could handle it as well as anyone else. :-P
See also the edge cases where the pilot(s) are incapacitated and an untrained civilian needs to be talked through the landing. How often does that happen in real life (and how often does it actually work?)
Earthquake [8]
Not really something ATC would be involved with except at the purely-tactical level. Ground outgoing traffic and reroute incoming flights until all-clear given by officials.
Pilot hits a deer [9]
Reroute traffic and alert medics.
Bomb threat on board, pilots decide to evacuate on the tarmac after no help arrives in ~1h [10]
Not an ATC issue except for the need to (guess what) reroute traffic.
They actively handle the traffic, and this task requires human pattern recognition and cross-domain reasoning skills in a matter of seconds, and the technology to replace this is simply not there yet. If you still disagree, I'd love to learn which technologies you'd apply to this problem and how they would compose with each other in order to achieve the same outcomes as in the cases I linked.
You could still have a valid overall point regarding the need for humans in the real-time loop, but I disagree that most of the scenarios you mention support that point. All of those cases can be (and are) anticipated, all of them have happened before except possibly [10], and all of them can be handled by computers at least as well as humans. Except possibly the situation with the pilot needing real-time psych support.
Let alone the fact that by AI we mean text models, so I'm not sure how they would integrate with terrain information, real-time radar data, arrival/departure routes, etc.
I definitely don't mean LLM-style text models. As I suggested in the first answer, nothing on this list except (again) #7 would have flummoxed a game programmer ten or twenty years ago. If some people want to try an ELIZA-like LLM to deal with #7, fine, but that would be a research problem. Nothing else on your list requires any new research.
if(conesOnTheRunway) {
closeRunway();
rerouteAircraftOnGround();
rerouteAircraftOnAir();
pickUpCones();
reopenRunway();
}
> Trivially handled by video game-grade AI.
I think it's fairly likely I have played more flight simulator games than you have. If you know of a single one of them where the ATC AI isn't utterly stupid, please do let me know, I'd love to try it. There's a reason VATSIM exists and remains very popular :)
Second, I wasn't referring to ATC AI in flight sims; as you suggest I have no experience with that. I doubt anyone ever put any serious effort into flight sim ATC AI compared with AI for realtime strategy or even FPS games. Years ago, a primitive neural net dragged a 9-dan Go master up and down the ban, so I imagine our current tech can handle a few planes.
I'm not paid to redesign the ATC system, or qualified to do so (although that won't stop Musk, I'm sure.) But as I've made clear, I believe it can and probably should be done. In practice it would probably look more like
if (AircrewOrEmployeesReportForeignObjectOnRunway)
{
closeRunwayAndRedirectTraffic();
alertFacilityPersonnel();
leaveRunWayClosedUntilSomeoneInAuthorityReopensIt();
}
I asked for examples of situations that couldn't be handled through automation, you provided some that I consider invalid or inapplicable, and... well, there we are. GG
Automation doesn't have to mean "level 5+: ATC AI on, let's go find an extended happy hour"
I think it's very important to separate the software engineering (and systems engineering, and safety and process design, and other disciplines involved on the object-level) from the challenges at the meta-level (politics, legal liability - insurability, scaling and economics, and procurement issues, avoiding yet another too big to fail boondoggle, and so on).
One obvious problem is that by definition someone sitting there doing their shift has a very holistic view, and asking them what do they need to do their job better might not worth it economically. (The faster horse problem. Though sending a few enthusiastic designers there, also crunching the numbers of the past near-misses and other issues would likely reveal gaps in the current procedures and tools, and ... and of course this all then runs aground because changing procedures and tools is hard, hello FAA, etc.) But, but, of course doing the top-to-bottom design naively is almost a surefire way to burn a few quick billion bucks for nothing. (So, I think this should be something like an ongoing challenge, like the DARPA Grand Challenge for driverless cars.)
By the way, this mentality is at odds with safety. If you design a safety-critical system under the assumption that nothing unexpected will ever happen, then whenever it happens (and it's a question of when, not if) people will die.
What can't be handled by doing that? You've listed quite a few examples (and thanks for taking the time to do so!) but all but one of them seem like perfectly reasonable scenarios for automation.
Another point I'd raise is that most ATC screwups don't involve anything weird happening except failures to follow existing ATC procedures. Any list of Things That Make For Bad Days at the Airport needs to include that.
Even the people in charge of our highways want us to switch to operations & maintenance oriented projects, but the representatives have not done so.
The incentives in government are really fucked — you get visibility and wins through cool projects, not by keeping the lights on and things running smoothly. Honestly true in big companies as well.
It's to a point some major parts of DFW like Plano and Frisco are only accessible via tollway. That's the only highway - the other "highway" has a light every half mile. Meanwhile, we have some of the most dangerous interstates and highways in the country.
Where's all that toll money going? I have no idea, but maybe it'll pan out. It just sucks because it's already quite expensive to commute in DFW.
The current administration is asking for a lot of money to try to fix it again
What they don't realize is maintaining infrastructure is expensive.
Sure there are a lot of inefficiencies with need to be fixed, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Sadly, such is society, and this is a problem that happens everywhere - be they democracies or authoritarian states.
that is, for context, about as high as it was in 1960 when the US population was half as large as it is today.
It breaks all our brains too, because that $6 Trillion has very little to do with maintaining infrastructure. The bulk of it is just direct payouts (Social Security, Medicare and defense contracts).
Pretty frustrating that this big number means the government is politically forced to do drastic austerity for things like keeping planes flying safely.
Also, makes DOGE starting at USAID (<1% of budget) look especially incompetent.
No, what you discover is a pattern of wasted spending. Then they ask for more money to actually get the job done despite all the waste.
People try to solve this by privatizing certain things, figuring that competition will help efficiency. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Maybe we need competing governments, and whichever government is more efficient gets to rule. Seriously: Add a second FAA at some test airports, see if they can do better, with the understanding that if they can't, they get shut down.
And you would be willing to be personally responsible if people die in this experiment?
It's funny how people here always complain that any money government spends is wasted, but if you look at big companies they are "wasting" money as well. Just look at the number of projects that google killed. It's simply a function of large (and small) organizations that they don't get it right all the time, it's difficult to predict the future.
I worked at a Fortune 50 financial services company back in the 1990s and they designed, built and deployed a brand, spanking new customer service platform.
They spent USD$200,000,000.00 building the system. It was ready for production when someone realized they'd spend USD$50,000,000+ per annum supporting the platform. The product roll out was scrapped, and tens of millions of dollars of equipment sat in warehouses.
When trying to redeploy said equipment across the enterprise, group heads would purchase new equipment rather than using the equipment sitting in warehouses as it was "cheaper" on their budget lines to spend real money rather than put the depreciation of already purchased equipment on those budget lines.
So yeah, big companies can be incredibly wasteful. Often more wasteful than government (e.g., US Medicare has ~3% overhead -- show me any private insurer that can top that) as well.
It's all about the incentives. People (and consequently, organizations) respond to the incentives inherent in a situation.
Sometimes those incentives promote efficient outcomes and sometimes not so much. The trick is to maximize the former and minimize the latter. Something easier said than done.
https://old.reddit.com/r/goodnews/comments/1kuaasx/i_voted_f...
>>I posted this somewhere else ages ago, feel it's relevant
>I remember having a conversation with my ex's sister and their mum a few years ago, around election time. I try to not talk politics with people because it's a fast way to lose friends, but the topic came up between my ex and them over dinner and I just listened in.
>I remember them saying that the only thing they're interested in is tax cuts. More money for them. I had to chime in and ask what about the NHS, what about funding schools? They said they didn't care because they had private healthcare through their jobs (finance), so they don't need the NHS. The mum said her kids are through school so she doesn't care about funding schools, and the sister said she'll be sending her kids to private school one day. I was pretty gobsmacked at the brazen selfishness of it, and asked what if they lose their jobs - and therefore their private health care - or become unable to work, what if when you have kids you can't afford private school? Neither of them could grasp this hypothetical... it was as if I was speaking another language to them. They were just like 'but we do have jobs.' And what if you didn't? 'But we do.' It was just circular and they couldn't see themselves in any situation other than the one they were currently in.
>I can quite see why empathy is a hard concept for right wingers to grasp, it was like they just simply couldn't understand the concept. They weren't stupid either, and nor were they rich - the mum worked in admin for a finance company in the city, and the sister was being paid by the same company (mum got her in the door) to train as an accountant.
>I think about those two every now and then when I can't understand how the other side thinks. Because it seems we do literally think very differently.