6 ms·

These orders, while written like they're orders, seem to be suggestions? They first ordered 20% flight reductions at major hubs, and 10% at minor hubs. Now the

by flerchin 11mo ago

These orders, while written like they're orders, seem to be suggestions? They first ordered 20% flight reductions at major hubs, and 10% at minor hubs. Now the airlines have cancelled low single digit percentages. This is easily viewable at flightaware. https://www.flightaware.com/live/cancelled/today https://www.flightaware.com/live/cancelled/today

galaxy_gas 11mo ago
The announcement say 4% Friday increase to 10% next week gradual ramp
- singron 11mo ago
  Source: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/FAA-Emergency-Order-11-6-25.pdf https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/FAA-Emergency-Order-11-6-25.pdf The order also only applies to domestic flights, so observed percentages on flightaware will be lower than those in the order.
londons_explore 11mo ago
I really want this to be the thing that pushes the industry into automated air traffic control. It's not even technically difficult - we only allow error-prone humans to do the job because of inertia. Build the system now, and then next time there is a government shutdown or shortage of air traffic controllers, we can say 'only planes equipped with an ipad with automatic air traffic control are allowed to fly'. Within 24h every plane in the nation will be equipped.
- Abekkus 11mo ago
  We can’t trust general use self driving cars yet. Air traffic control is a bit riskier than that
  - kayodelycaon 11mo ago
    There’s a lot of automation that can be done to reduce the workload of controllers. Making an autopilot for airplanes is significantly easier than cars.
    - roncesvalles 11mo ago
      But the stakes are much higher. On a side note, I will use this thread to air out my biggest pet peeve - air travel isn't in fact safer than car travel. Well, it is, per mile, but that's cheating because planes travel so fast. Obviously a 3 hour commercial flight is safer than 40 hours of driving. But cars are still safer per journey. So, if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, your car ride wasn't actually more dangerous than your flight as the saying goes. The only road-based transportion more dangerous than a plane is the bicycle.
      - amluto 11mo ago
        Commercial air travel has a passenger fatality on something like one in ten million flights [0], and less than that on newer aircraft. Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. [1] So maybe you are technically correct. Barely. And it has nothing to do with airplanes being fast — planes only need to go a few tens of miles per trip to be significantly safer than cars, and plane trips are a lot longer than that. [0] https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm [1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
        nandomrumber 11mo ago
        > Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. Which is vanishingly small. It means the average driver can expect to be a fatality in an automobile accident once ever one to two hundred years or more.
        sokoloff 11mo ago
  - viraptor 11mo ago
    Completely different things. Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead. Comparing their risk is a complete apples and oranges situation. Than again, ATC needs to deal with people talking on the radio, so the current system has a really long way to go to be completely automated.
    - tjohns 11mo ago
      Air traffic also requires the use of visual skills - and it’s harder than driving because of the small target size and wide field of view. “See and avoid” has a very high priority in the cockpit - not everything out there is on radar, not everything on radar is under ATC control.
    - radishingr 11mo ago
      Also remember that ATC is vital for emergency situations. "Your distress call is important to us, please continue screaming into the void and hopefully a miracle happens.
    - Aurornis 11mo ago
      > Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead. It's funny to read all of these confident comments claiming ATC is easily automated from people who obviously don't understand what ATC entails. ATC isn't just planning and scheduling. There is a lot of quick thinking and communication with pilots. You might only be thinking of the everything-goes-perfectly-right case, but the real value of having trained ATC operators is handling all of the edge cases and making quick decisions under high pressure scenarios that may not have even been represented in the training set. ATC is also partially a visual job. Did you ever notice that there's literally a tower at the airport for air traffic control people? The people in this tower will manage things like traffic on the ground and immediate airspace around the tower. Visual inputs and critical thinking skills are very necessary.
      - 11mo ago
  - terminalshort 11mo ago
    Speak for yourself. I ride in Waymos frequently.
- AniseAbyss 11mo ago
  [dead]
- singron 11mo ago
  In some ways, they started in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Transportation_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Transporta... There are a ton of details on the page that go into why it is so hard. One reason is that there are a lot of fundamental things to build and deploy before anything can be automated. E.g. before ADS-B (equipment on planes that detects its own location with GPS and automatically broadcasts it), ATC needed to talk to pilots and ask them where they were in a lot of cases. ADS-B has only been required on commercial flights since 2020. Then it also suffers like every large government software project where a bunch of $100+ million contracts get paid out to private companies while nothing gets built. And it's part of annual appropriations, so funding was unpredictable. It's like working at a software company that had a major layoff or hiring spree every year for the last 20 years. If we could figure out how to run major project, the value to humanity would be enormous.
- TylerE 11mo ago
  This is a ludicrously short sighted post. Do you know what ATC actually involves? It involves talking, via voice, to annoying bags of meat over analog radio. We are very, very, very far from automated ATC. We can't even get automatic TRAINS to work reliably and thats a far simpler problem.
  - terminalshort 11mo ago
    Copenhagen has an automated metro system.
    - victorbjorklund 11mo ago
      way easier to automate than coordinating airplanes
      - terminalshort 11mo ago
        Yes, but I was responding to this: "We can't even get automatic TRAINS to work reliably"
- radishingr 11mo ago
  ATC is hundreds of functions and dozens of responsibilities like checking that the runway is safe to land. "Clear to land" is not just a turn of phrase, it is a check and verify that an aircraft with hundreds of people is relying on. Air traffic is not a deterministic system, it is squishy and significantly more complicated because it involves humans, complex mechanical systems, and weather floating on top of a sea of limited resources.
  - nandomrumber 11mo ago
    Automating just the error prone radio calls would be a massive start. Those could be sent as short text messages that appear on a screen in the cockpit, for the pilots to acknowledge receipt of with a limit set of responses, and would give ATC a lot more time to focus on their other duties.
    - cullenking 11mo ago
      So like texting and driving, but in the air? Flying is hard, I don’t think an automated text based system would be safer than what we have now.
      - nandomrumber 11mo ago
        Try responding to the strongest possible interpretation of what someone says. Anyway, this wasn’t my idea, it came from one of the handful of active / recently retired commercial pilots on YouTube.
    - nradov 11mo ago
      This is already being done at many major airports through the FAA Data Comm program. https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/data-communications-data-comm-0 https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/data-communications-data-comm-0
      - nandomrumber 11mo ago
        Thanks for linking that, I wasn’t aware it was that far in to development / production.
- Gathering6678 11mo ago
  More automation while keeping trained professionals in the loop is definitely going to help with safety. But the money comes from ... ?
- rainsford 11mo ago
  Trusting the safety of a flight to the reliability of an ipad is a ludicrously bad idea. Lots of pilots fly with ipads as a tool and they're generally pretty good, but they're nowhere near up to aviation standards of reliability and banking the whole safety of the flight on the reliability of a consumer good seems unwise. Ask any private pilot who's flown on a hot sunny day with an overheating ipad how good the idea sounds. Edit: More automation is certainly an idea that ATC should continue to pursue, and there has been progress already. But the idea that total automation is possible much less easy ignores a lot of the complexity and reality of how air traffic actually works.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

galaxy_gas 11mo ago

The announcement say 4% Friday increase to 10% next week gradual ramp

singron 11mo ago
Source: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/FAA-Emergency-Order-11-6-25.pdf https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/FAA-Emergency-Order-11-6-25.pdf The order also only applies to domestic flights, so observed percentages on flightaware will be lower than those in the order.

londons_explore 11mo ago

I really want this to be the thing that pushes the industry into automated air traffic control. It's not even technically difficult - we only allow error-prone humans to do the job because of inertia. Build the system now, and then next time there is a government shutdown or shortage of air traffic controllers, we can say 'only planes equipped with an ipad with automatic air traffic control are allowed to fly'. Within 24h every plane in the nation will be equipped.

Abekkus 11mo ago
We can’t trust general use self driving cars yet. Air traffic control is a bit riskier than that
- kayodelycaon 11mo ago
  There’s a lot of automation that can be done to reduce the workload of controllers. Making an autopilot for airplanes is significantly easier than cars.
  - roncesvalles 11mo ago
    But the stakes are much higher. On a side note, I will use this thread to air out my biggest pet peeve - air travel isn't in fact safer than car travel. Well, it is, per mile, but that's cheating because planes travel so fast. Obviously a 3 hour commercial flight is safer than 40 hours of driving. But cars are still safer per journey. So, if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, your car ride wasn't actually more dangerous than your flight as the saying goes. The only road-based transportion more dangerous than a plane is the bicycle.
    - amluto 11mo ago
      Commercial air travel has a passenger fatality on something like one in ten million flights [0], and less than that on newer aircraft. Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. [1] So maybe you are technically correct. Barely. And it has nothing to do with airplanes being fast — planes only need to go a few tens of miles per trip to be significantly safer than cars, and plane trips are a lot longer than that. [0] https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm [1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
      - nandomrumber 11mo ago
        > Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. Which is vanishingly small. It means the average driver can expect to be a fatality in an automobile accident once ever one to two hundred years or more.
        sokoloff 11mo ago
- viraptor 11mo ago
  Completely different things. Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead. Comparing their risk is a complete apples and oranges situation. Than again, ATC needs to deal with people talking on the radio, so the current system has a really long way to go to be completely automated.
  - tjohns 11mo ago
    Air traffic also requires the use of visual skills - and it’s harder than driving because of the small target size and wide field of view. “See and avoid” has a very high priority in the cockpit - not everything out there is on radar, not everything on radar is under ATC control.
  - radishingr 11mo ago
    Also remember that ATC is vital for emergency situations. "Your distress call is important to us, please continue screaming into the void and hopefully a miracle happens.
  - Aurornis 11mo ago
    > Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead. It's funny to read all of these confident comments claiming ATC is easily automated from people who obviously don't understand what ATC entails. ATC isn't just planning and scheduling. There is a lot of quick thinking and communication with pilots. You might only be thinking of the everything-goes-perfectly-right case, but the real value of having trained ATC operators is handling all of the edge cases and making quick decisions under high pressure scenarios that may not have even been represented in the training set. ATC is also partially a visual job. Did you ever notice that there's literally a tower at the airport for air traffic control people? The people in this tower will manage things like traffic on the ground and immediate airspace around the tower. Visual inputs and critical thinking skills are very necessary.
    - 11mo ago
- terminalshort 11mo ago
  Speak for yourself. I ride in Waymos frequently.
AniseAbyss 11mo ago
[dead]
singron 11mo ago
In some ways, they started in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Transportation_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Transporta... There are a ton of details on the page that go into why it is so hard. One reason is that there are a lot of fundamental things to build and deploy before anything can be automated. E.g. before ADS-B (equipment on planes that detects its own location with GPS and automatically broadcasts it), ATC needed to talk to pilots and ask them where they were in a lot of cases. ADS-B has only been required on commercial flights since 2020. Then it also suffers like every large government software project where a bunch of $100+ million contracts get paid out to private companies while nothing gets built. And it's part of annual appropriations, so funding was unpredictable. It's like working at a software company that had a major layoff or hiring spree every year for the last 20 years. If we could figure out how to run major project, the value to humanity would be enormous.
TylerE 11mo ago
This is a ludicrously short sighted post. Do you know what ATC actually involves? It involves talking, via voice, to annoying bags of meat over analog radio. We are very, very, very far from automated ATC. We can't even get automatic TRAINS to work reliably and thats a far simpler problem.
- terminalshort 11mo ago
  Copenhagen has an automated metro system.
  - victorbjorklund 11mo ago
    way easier to automate than coordinating airplanes
    - terminalshort 11mo ago
      Yes, but I was responding to this: "We can't even get automatic TRAINS to work reliably"
radishingr 11mo ago
ATC is hundreds of functions and dozens of responsibilities like checking that the runway is safe to land. "Clear to land" is not just a turn of phrase, it is a check and verify that an aircraft with hundreds of people is relying on. Air traffic is not a deterministic system, it is squishy and significantly more complicated because it involves humans, complex mechanical systems, and weather floating on top of a sea of limited resources.
- nandomrumber 11mo ago
  Automating just the error prone radio calls would be a massive start. Those could be sent as short text messages that appear on a screen in the cockpit, for the pilots to acknowledge receipt of with a limit set of responses, and would give ATC a lot more time to focus on their other duties.
  - cullenking 11mo ago
    So like texting and driving, but in the air? Flying is hard, I don’t think an automated text based system would be safer than what we have now.
    - nandomrumber 11mo ago
      Try responding to the strongest possible interpretation of what someone says. Anyway, this wasn’t my idea, it came from one of the handful of active / recently retired commercial pilots on YouTube.
  - nradov 11mo ago
    This is already being done at many major airports through the FAA Data Comm program. https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/data-communications-data-comm-0 https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/data-communications-data-comm-0
    - nandomrumber 11mo ago
      Thanks for linking that, I wasn’t aware it was that far in to development / production.
Gathering6678 11mo ago
More automation while keeping trained professionals in the loop is definitely going to help with safety. But the money comes from ... ?
rainsford 11mo ago
Trusting the safety of a flight to the reliability of an ipad is a ludicrously bad idea. Lots of pilots fly with ipads as a tool and they're generally pretty good, but they're nowhere near up to aviation standards of reliability and banking the whole safety of the flight on the reliability of a consumer good seems unwise. Ask any private pilot who's flown on a hot sunny day with an overheating ipad how good the idea sounds. Edit: More automation is certainly an idea that ATC should continue to pursue, and there has been progress already. But the idea that total automation is possible much less easy ignores a lot of the complexity and reality of how air traffic actually works.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]