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> Most of the radio calls today (>95%) are bog standard verbal exchanges about things that should not require any humans in the loop. Anything to with weather i

> Most of the radio calls today (>95%) are bog standard verbal exchanges about things that should not require any humans in the loop. Anything to with weather is just numbers that can and should be be exchanged digitally. Much faster, less room for error. There should be zero confusion about what the altimeter settings are at a particular airport, what the active runway is, where the wind is coming from, etc. > Anything to do with "who are you and why are you here", which is a disturbingly large proportion of verbal exchanges, sounds like it could be established both more securely, robustly, and efficiently. We have computers now with things like secure hashes, uuids, certificates, etc. Any time you have enough bandwidth to talk to somebody you definitely have enough bandwidth to throw quite a bit of data around securely and reliably. The problem is, for that to work, you'd need to push a worldwide coordinated effort to upgrade everyone. Hundreds of thousands of GA aircraft, historical aircraft, about 30k commercial aircraft and most likely hundreds if not thousands of different models. For each of these you'd need to develop and most importantly certify a digital avionics package. And you'd need to train about half a million pilots for commercial flight, on top of that all the GA pilots. And no, "give pilots an iPad" doesn't count. That's what many airlines are already doing so pilots have an alternative to paper charts of approaches or on-ground navigation... but the old paper and radio? That all still has gotta be present because that stuff is actually certified to be redundant and (largely) fail-proof. There's a reason innovation speed is very slow in aviation: it took decades worth of work and many thousands of deaths to get aviation to be what it is: the most safe way of transportation by far. You probably have a higher chance of getting hit by a drunk driver than to even get a small injury on a commercial airplane, because all the failure modes of airplanes and individual parts have been worked out. Every kind of new part, new systems and new material introduces new failure modes that have to be discovered, mitigated and the mitigation be distributed around the world.

jillesvangurp 1y ago
You are describing why something that hasn't changed for decades won't change for decades. Because nothing ever changes. All of that stops being true when change is forced. My closing argument provides that change vector: a couple of orders of magnitude increase in flight movements and autonomous flight. From a technical and practical point of view this stuff isn't actually hard: you start with the big airlines. Maintaining and refurbishing airplanes is something they spend lots of money on. Hundreds of thousands per plane per year. So, there's plenty of budget and a little bit of new equipment won't really move the needle. Just look at how quickly ipads got adopted by pilots. Many pilots won't fly without one now. Reason: they are good and they provide redundancy when the multi million thing in front of them has an electrical failure. It provides GPS, can talk to ADSB via bluetooth. You can have an artificial horizon on it, etc. Pilots won't use them as a primary instrument (that would be illegal) but they are well capable as an emergency replacement with the right apps. This industry can move fast when it needs to. Ipads are cheap. They provide convenience and safety. So pretty much any pilot will want one in their plane. The issue isn't technical but bureaucratic. If ipads had to have gone through some FAA controlled design committee, they would never have gotten this popular. But they didn't. The history of this stuff is that airlines got organized first before the FAA took over. They'll have to force these changes.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > From a technical and practical point of view this stuff isn't actually hard: you start with the big airlines. You still need to get any new integration certified, and not just on the plane side, but also on the ground. And it's ... problematic because you would then have two wildly different systems in parallel, and pilots would need to switch between radio and digital all the time. Too much potential for chaos.

jillesvangurp 1y ago

You are describing why something that hasn't changed for decades won't change for decades. Because nothing ever changes. All of that stops being true when change is forced. My closing argument provides that change vector: a couple of orders of magnitude increase in flight movements and autonomous flight. From a technical and practical point of view this stuff isn't actually hard: you start with the big airlines. Maintaining and refurbishing airplanes is something they spend lots of money on. Hundreds of thousands per plane per year. So, there's plenty of budget and a little bit of new equipment won't really move the needle. Just look at how quickly ipads got adopted by pilots. Many pilots won't fly without one now. Reason: they are good and they provide redundancy when the multi million thing in front of them has an electrical failure. It provides GPS, can talk to ADSB via bluetooth. You can have an artificial horizon on it, etc. Pilots won't use them as a primary instrument (that would be illegal) but they are well capable as an emergency replacement with the right apps. This industry can move fast when it needs to. Ipads are cheap. They provide convenience and safety. So pretty much any pilot will want one in their plane. The issue isn't technical but bureaucratic. If ipads had to have gone through some FAA controlled design committee, they would never have gotten this popular. But they didn't. The history of this stuff is that airlines got organized first before the FAA took over. They'll have to force these changes.

mschuster91 1y ago
> From a technical and practical point of view this stuff isn't actually hard: you start with the big airlines. You still need to get any new integration certified, and not just on the plane side, but also on the ground. And it's ... problematic because you would then have two wildly different systems in parallel, and pilots would need to switch between radio and digital all the time. Too much potential for chaos.