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Air traffic control seems like something that should be at the top level surveyed by humans but has many layers of automated computational safety built in. I im

Air traffic control seems like something that should be at the top level surveyed by humans but has many layers of automated computational safety built in. I imagine there is, but the idea that the safety of a plane is up to a single person at some point is unsettling. Having existed for many decades, the entire field should be far past the point of there being even a 0.000000001% chance of hazard.

woodruffw 3y ago
ATC makes extensive use of automation for scheduling, queuing, etc. The hard manual parts are what remain: communicating with pilots over unreliable channels, handling unpredictable scenarios and emergencies, and maintaining spatial awareness for the airport and the tower's area of control.
shermantanktop 3y ago
Your expectations don’t seem to match any other field of human endeavor I can think of. Nuclear plant safety doesn’t; rocket launches, no; pharmaceutical trials, nope. Perhaps we’ll be better and smarter in the future, but…I doubt it.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  When was the last time Nuclear plants in the US significantly endangered human lives. 1979? With regards to rocket launches, pharma, etc. those are all somewhat novel domains: experiments where risk is a natural part of being the first time trying a set of variables. The variables in air traffic have been the same for decades, thus the thresholds for accepted risk should be much lower.
  - shermantanktop 3y ago
    Call me a techno-pessimist, but we humans have a way of building imperfect machines regardless of theoretical perfectibility. Boeing 737 max?
    - bryant 3y ago
      In fairness, perfect and simple almost never go hand in hand in life critical applications because simple is almost entirely incapable of accounting for and mitigating impacts from the entropy of the universe. Couple that with capitalism (the 737 max's design, oversimplified, resulted in two disasters due to a for-profit company trying to maximize profit and minimize time to market by hacking an existing platform to compete with a new and ostensibly better one) and it's a surprise we're doing well with air travel at all. That air travel is as good as it is is a great case for techno optimism. In spite of all the garbage we get ourselves into, we manage to make it work.
  - ejiblabahaba 3y ago
    The US literally stopped issuing new reactor permits in 1979 (down from on-average about 12 per year), and didn't begin issuing new ones until 2012. Out of 177 reactors issued construction permits up through 1979, at most 112 were ever online at once, in 1991, up from 69 in 1979 when the Three Mile Island failure happened - implying over half of already permitted construction was abandoned or never even started. The facilities under construction were subject to an exponentially increasing gauntlet of new safety assessments, failsafe systems, and in many cases reconstruction of things already built and approved just years prior; eventually, the expense of such facilities radically outstripped the expected ROI of nuclear facilities altogether. Most facilities overran on costs, and took decades longer than expected to see their first real returns, if they even stayed open long enough to see real returns. If US nuclear plants haven't significantly endangered human lives since 1979, it's because the thresholds for accepted risk became so low as to render new enterprise impossible. Regulating air traffic control (and thus air traffic) into impossibility isn't a realistic option. Unlike nuclear energy, which has functionally equivalent alternatives, there is no functional equivalent to the speed, reach, and cost of air travel. We likely already hit the practical floor on incidents in ATC a long time ago, thanks to (as you have observed) the variables involved being very stable for decades. Hence the cause for alarm: what if, all of a sudden, those reliable variables are changing?
    - atleastoptimal 3y ago
      What variables are changing in air travel that haven't before?
matwood 3y ago
The US Navy presumably has a near unlimited budget and aircraft carriers are still very analog in this regard. There have been some attempts to make the ouija board digital, but still have it be manually updated. https://coffeeordie.com/ouija-boards-aircraft-carriers https://coffeeordie.com/ouija-boards-aircraft-carriers

woodruffw 3y ago

ATC makes extensive use of automation for scheduling, queuing, etc. The hard manual parts are what remain: communicating with pilots over unreliable channels, handling unpredictable scenarios and emergencies, and maintaining spatial awareness for the airport and the tower's area of control.

shermantanktop 3y ago

Your expectations don’t seem to match any other field of human endeavor I can think of. Nuclear plant safety doesn’t; rocket launches, no; pharmaceutical trials, nope. Perhaps we’ll be better and smarter in the future, but…I doubt it.

atleastoptimal 3y ago
When was the last time Nuclear plants in the US significantly endangered human lives. 1979? With regards to rocket launches, pharma, etc. those are all somewhat novel domains: experiments where risk is a natural part of being the first time trying a set of variables. The variables in air traffic have been the same for decades, thus the thresholds for accepted risk should be much lower.
- shermantanktop 3y ago
  Call me a techno-pessimist, but we humans have a way of building imperfect machines regardless of theoretical perfectibility. Boeing 737 max?
  - bryant 3y ago
    In fairness, perfect and simple almost never go hand in hand in life critical applications because simple is almost entirely incapable of accounting for and mitigating impacts from the entropy of the universe. Couple that with capitalism (the 737 max's design, oversimplified, resulted in two disasters due to a for-profit company trying to maximize profit and minimize time to market by hacking an existing platform to compete with a new and ostensibly better one) and it's a surprise we're doing well with air travel at all. That air travel is as good as it is is a great case for techno optimism. In spite of all the garbage we get ourselves into, we manage to make it work.
- ejiblabahaba 3y ago
  The US literally stopped issuing new reactor permits in 1979 (down from on-average about 12 per year), and didn't begin issuing new ones until 2012. Out of 177 reactors issued construction permits up through 1979, at most 112 were ever online at once, in 1991, up from 69 in 1979 when the Three Mile Island failure happened - implying over half of already permitted construction was abandoned or never even started. The facilities under construction were subject to an exponentially increasing gauntlet of new safety assessments, failsafe systems, and in many cases reconstruction of things already built and approved just years prior; eventually, the expense of such facilities radically outstripped the expected ROI of nuclear facilities altogether. Most facilities overran on costs, and took decades longer than expected to see their first real returns, if they even stayed open long enough to see real returns. If US nuclear plants haven't significantly endangered human lives since 1979, it's because the thresholds for accepted risk became so low as to render new enterprise impossible. Regulating air traffic control (and thus air traffic) into impossibility isn't a realistic option. Unlike nuclear energy, which has functionally equivalent alternatives, there is no functional equivalent to the speed, reach, and cost of air travel. We likely already hit the practical floor on incidents in ATC a long time ago, thanks to (as you have observed) the variables involved being very stable for decades. Hence the cause for alarm: what if, all of a sudden, those reliable variables are changing?
  - atleastoptimal 3y ago
    What variables are changing in air travel that haven't before?

matwood 3y ago

The US Navy presumably has a near unlimited budget and aircraft carriers are still very analog in this regard. There have been some attempts to make the ouija board digital, but still have it be manually updated. https://coffeeordie.com/ouija-boards-aircraft-carriers https://coffeeordie.com/ouija-boards-aircraft-carriers