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Honest question: are air traffic controllers at risk for being replaced with AI systems? My initial thought is no, there is too much complexity, but AI could he

• joezydeco 2y ago
  The FAA adopts new technologies at a glacial pace, for good reason. But AI has been mentioned in the planning of the next generation of ATC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Wide_Information_Management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Wide_Information_Manage... https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/atiec/media/Presentations/2021/ATIEC_2021_Altus_SWIM_as_presented.pdf https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/atiec/me...
• unsnap_biceps 2y ago
  Perhaps some day, I would hope that we make a lot of progress before we look towards the current form of AI in such a critical spot.
• droopyEyelids 2y ago
  What kind of ai are you talking about? The non deterministic black box LLMs we have now?
  • jonathanlb 2y ago
    Of course not LLMs, but approaches using mixed integer programming, genetic algorithms, and/or simulated annealing.
    • whatwhaaaaat 2y ago
      Are these new products from Rockwell automation?
    • kristjansson 2y ago
      Oh, algorithms, they should have thought of those.
  • CamperBob2 2y ago
    The kind that could land an atomic-powered vehicle on Mars, eight light-minutes from human contact? In 2012? It's utterly ridiculous to expect humans to do this job for much longer. It's what computers are for.
    • justinspace 2y ago
      Gosh, you'd think someone would've thought of this already.
      • CamperBob2 2y ago
        That's not an answer (and neither are downvotes). Why are humans still doing tedious work that would be utterly trivial for computers?
    • thowawatp302 2y ago
      Oh you mean the kind that has no conflicting traffic in 0.5 to 2.5 AU?
      • CamperBob2 2y ago
        Really? There were 3 aircraft involved. Game AI in the 1980s was good enough to handle the amount of "conflicting traffic" involved here. You're arguing in favor of automation, not against it. For that matter, next time you visit the Bay Area, drop by the CHM in Mountain View and take a look at what SAGE could already do in the 1960s.
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
        • thowawatp302 2y ago
          Yeah no it wasn’t just three, actually listen to the ATC auto between PAT25 calls into the controller and the crash — not to mention it’s still far more than a single aircraft on a remote planet
  • rich_sasha 2y ago
    > ATC please advise, I'm about crash > Thanks for reaching out! As you probably know, crashing an aeroplane is not generally recommended. There are many factors that may contribute to a crash, such as weather, technical malfunction or human error. Appropriate training, regular maintenance and flight planning are some of the best practices which help minimise the likelihood of a crash. I recommend revisiting these factors. Is there anything else I can help you with today?
• tjohns 2y ago
  No. We use some deterministic automation on the backend for helping with traffic management and rerouting flight paths, but the communication with aircraft is mostly done via voice. Everything happens too fast to insert a keyboard in the middle (*), and voice recognition would be too error prone for something safety critical. (* CPDLC does allow ATC to send texts to/from larger aircraft, but this is only used for things that aren't time sensitive. Voice is still the primary method of control.)
  • wkat4242 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • tjohns 2y ago
      It also has to listen, and accept complex requests and demands from pilots over a scratchy and occasionally garbled radio link. Have you ever gotten frustrated because Alexa/Siri/etc completely misinterpreted a voice request? Or looked at the quality of YouTube subtitles? That’s still lots of inaccuracy with AI speech recognition. There’s no room for that up there. And yes, the non-deterministic nature is a huge problem given this is the very definition of a life-critical system.
      • wkat4242 2y ago
        I know, but these things can be trained for. Siri/Alexa is 2010 tech, not 2025. And the big benefit is that there's a pretty limited vocabulary and phraseology in aviation. I don't see ATC being replaced yet but in the future perhaps something more automated could happen including more visual instructions.
• hattmall 2y ago
  Why would it need to even be AI? Why not just regular software? Couldn't airplanes just send a message that they want to land and the Air Traffic Control software sees where they are and what other aircraft are around and sends everyone the appropriate messages?
  • schoen 2y ago
    The human ATC system is very good at handling exceptions, including various kinds of emergencies, pilot errors, and reasons to prioritize one plane over another. The human controllers also typically have a good understanding of the details of airspace, regulations, policies, aviation customs, and the capabilities of various kinds of aircraft. So for example, a plane can have a "missed approach and go around" when trying to land. I was once on a plane that did that because of extremely high winds. In that case, the plane that was supposed to be on the ground is suddenly climbing again and is going to need to turn in order to repeat the approach. A plane can have a medical emergency onboard, so it needs to land at an unexpected airport, possibly faster than a normal landing, or starting from a somewhat atypical position. I was once on a plane that did that because someone onboard had a seizure. A plane can have damage or equipment failures that the pilots find it hard to assess directly, so it needs to fly around for a while to give the pilots time to "run checklists" or perform various tests, or sometimes to let a ground-based observer report on something about the plane (!), or just to develop their intuition about how functional the plane is. It might then need to land at an unintended airport or return unexpectedly to its takeoff airport. I was once on a plane that did that because of bird strikes during departure, where the plane was damaged but the pilots were unsure how seriously. A pilot might misunderstand something or disobey regulations, and that pilot or another pilot might be told to take some unexpected evasive action to avoid a collision. (This is one area that has been productively automated in some cases via TCAS, where the aircraft themselves can sometimes figure out what an appropriate maneuver would be before a controller tells them one.) I haven't personally experienced that. There might be another kind of emergency where a runway is closed and a large number of planes need to be diverted (like right after this collision where DCA was abruptly closed). There might be negotiations with an uncooperative or mentally ill pilot (like the tragic story of Richard Russell in 2018, but also a number of incidents that had happier endings). Pilots might also negotiate more cooperatively with ATC related to diversions and priority in situations like bad weather, where the airport has less capacity than originally expected and the pilots need to determine whether they will divert to a different airport. In this case the air traffic controllers may talk to different pilots about their fuel levels and other factors that make them better and worse candidates for changing flight plans. En-route (ARTCC/ACC) controllers will also negotiate with pilots about changing altitude to reduce or avoid turbulence. There are occasionally cases where a pilot is incapacitated and someone with less training and experience needs to be advised remotely on how to land a plane. (This is mostly very small planes but ATC will still ultimately deal with these emergencies.) In that case other planes also need to be kept away from the incident aircraft and maybe diverted elsewhere. Specifically for takeoff and landing, there are often multiple planes using the same runway (for takeoff, landing, or both) in relatively quick succession, or possibly using runways that cross each other. In this case, a controller needs to keep an eye on how quickly pilots have (or haven't) complied with specific clearances, e.g. to cross a runway on the ground, because the clearances may need to be revoked or modified if they aren't used quickly enough (because of the presence of other aircraft that have also received clearances that will soon start to conflict with the older clearances). This also includes checking whether planes that have landed have vacated the runway expeditiously (since if they haven't done so, for whatever reason, other planes may soon need to be told to go around). There are also cases where military or law enforcement authorities may ask or demand to modify normal ATC procedures or clearances because of some special operation or problem. The simplest case is that they might ask to prioritize a government aircraft over civilian flights for some reason, or ask certain other operations to stop e.g. during a takeoff or landing of Air Force One. (I just watched this a few days ago with an Air Force One departure from Las Vegas, where other departures and landings were temporarily but briefly suspended. So that had to be planned and communicated to various pilots, some of whom then had follow-up questions about what they were or weren't allowed to do.) Pilots are also considered to have ultimate responsibility for the safety of their flights and passengers, and they can also refuse some ATC instructions, or deviate from some normal procedures, in emergencies. So for example, a controller might believe it's safe to land in certain weather conditions and might give a pilot a certain clearance, but the pilot might not feel up to completing the landing and might then refuse to do so. The controller will have to understand the pilot's intentions as best as possible, and deal with the consequences of those intentions (e.g., once again, keeping other planes out of the way, or trying to find a new routing that the pilot will be willing to accept). ATC is also responsible for passing some kinds of information to and from other parties, like in case of an emergency landing communicating with emergency responders so that they understand the nature of the emergency and whatever facts will help them respond more effectively. And they have to tell other ATC facilities about problems and situations that will affect them, like in-flight emergencies, closed airspace, closed runways, closed airport, etc. Many of these things can and should be more automated than they are, but humans in these jobs are doing enormous amounts of reasoning, improvisation, and even social negotiation. (I'm not a pilot or air traffic controller, just a former frequent flyer who liked listening to ATC communications and sometimes listens to liveatc.net when friends' flights are arriving or departing, or watches video recaps of various aviation incidents.) Edit: Another case that I thought of: during an emergency landing, a pilot might be given either a shorter (more direct) or longer (more indirect) route than usual, in response to the pilot's assessment of which would be safer. The pilot could also be given a longer route than usual in order to have time to "work checklists" in preparation for the landing, or in order to burn off fuel so that the plane will weigh less (and be less likely to cause a huge fire) upon landing. If some navigation equipment is broken, the ATC facility could help with navigation or with diagnosing the problem (by describing visual landmarks, or by estimating the plane's current speed and heading based on ATC radar).
• stall84 2y ago
  There's no good excuse, other than cost and training and equipment integration (which are massive costs, i know) for not having some kind of learning or at a minimum high levels of automation in 2025.
• kristjansson 2y ago
  Replaced, no. ATC, at least while we still have human pilots, is a system for instructing, organizing, and responding to humans, with all their flexibility and foible. Now a copilot e.g. ATC audio parsed by an LLM into intended tracks, requests from traffic, integrated into the scope with projections for future separation etc…
• bobthepanda 2y ago
  The SOTA is augmented ATC displays and digital towers, which basically use object recognition to label planes on cameras, and the controllers sit somewhere else. Usually this is done for rural airports, where you have one controller potentially managing multiple low traffic airports, and it’s tough to get ATC willing to move to remote locations. The only busy airport doing this kind of thing is London City Airport, but that has 3M passengers a year and DCA has 25M. That was motivated by the lack of space at London City Airport, so they demolished the traditional tower to reallocate space. London City implementation: https://www.nats.aero/news/london-city-is-first-major-airport-controlled-by-remote-digital-tower/ https://www.nats.aero/news/london-city-is-first-major-airpor...
• rich_sasha 2y ago
  Ages ago, I watched a documentary about ATC that showed a drill involving ATC work under power failure (mains and generator). I'm probably misremembering some details but there were battery-operated radios and little tablets being passed around with scribbled information. I guess AI can work while the lights are on, but if this is your backstop scenario, you still need the meat ATC controllers, and they really need to know their stuff.
• mapt 2y ago
  Tower systems are the last place in the world you would want a 97% accurate large language model, and the very last place we would culturally tolerate this sort of thing. Innate conservatism is what happens when deviations from perfection lead to collisions, and for the most part "AI" success remains a stochastic matter, gigabyte to terabyte sized tensors that are not human-intelligible. A black box which cannot be readily, safely validated in the real world. With that said - algorithmic, automated, and digital systems for collision avoidance at the very minimum have and could continue to make ATC jobs significantly easier. The radio voice channel is a particularly low fidelity, low bandwidth way to mete out information and directives.
  • sorokod 2y ago
    There will be a list of scenarios competing for that "last place". Operating rooms, certain military/police situations and self driving cars come to mind. A shared characteristic here is that errors lead to fatal outcomes exacerbated by unclear accountability.
    • wbl 2y ago
      Self driving cars are already operating no problem.
    • mncharity 2y ago
      Yes, but, as with collision avoidance systems... Years ago a VA thoracic surgeon was trying to find someone to build them a tool to listen in an OR for surgeon commands and team member acks, and if it saw a command without an ack, to nudge. Context is surgeons are both team managers and individual specialists, and when heads down as specialist, the managerial role gets load shed. So a dropped command may not be caught before bad things happen. The VA does OR pickup teams, so there isn't the polished but idiosyncratic load sharing of long-standing teams. And the acks are more formal. He was fine with a high false negative rate (catching anything is good), and a moderate false positive (nudges are low cost). That seems now plausible. Aside from tech maturity, the biggest challenge then envisioned was willingness to be recorded. Though perhaps the real fix is staffing the team management role, but that was above his pay grade.