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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
by londons_explore 1y 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 1y agoWe can’t trust general use self driving cars yet. Air traffic control is a bit riskier than that
- kayodelycaon 1y agoThere’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 1y agoBut 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 1y agoCommercial 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 1y 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 1y agoIf you drive a fairly typical 12.5K miles per year, it will take you 8000 years to drive 100M miles. “Or more” technically includes a factor of 20-80x, but I think you were way low.
- nandomrumber 1y agoThanks. Sloppy work. I’m half an Australia away from my usual internet-rant tooling, and I find multi-tab cross referencing on mobile pretty unenjoyable.
- roncesvalles 1y agoAll I'm saying is: if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, the drive to the airport wasn't more dangerous than your flight on the plane. This is intuitive and obvious and yet is somehow beaten out of us by "quick facts" that we accept blindly touting commercial aviation as some kind of miracle. It's still a miracle but not quite to the degree that people believe. Hurtling through the sky at 0.8 Mach in a metal tube will always be more dangerous than rolling down a highway in a metal cage at 70 mph. None of the people who responded to me yet have refuted this.
- DougBTX 1y agoFrom https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/ https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/ > In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was .003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on US highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles. Planes travel about 10x-20x faster than cars, but that’s still 0.06 vs 0.57. Seems like quite a difference. Which numbers are you using?
- sokoloff 1y agoIs the purpose of travel to go from one place to another or to spend time? If it’s to go from one place to another, referencing statistics to per-mile seems to make more sense and, to me, it’s in no way “cheating because planes travel so fast”.
- roncesvalles 1y agoBut your choice of destination changes because air travel is available to you. You wouldn't go to a destination thousands of miles away, as often, if it weren't possible to fly there.
- nradov 1y agoIt's always hilarious to see ignorant developers on HN claiming that real world engineering problems are easy to solve based on zero actual knowledge or experience. This kind of comment is really peak HN. An autopilot for airplanes is only "easy" until something goes wrong. For example, one failure mode for autopilots is that if the aircraft gets progressively more and more out of trim the autopilot will automatically compensate until it hits its design limit. Then it suddenly disengages, leaving the human pilots in manual control of a nearly uncontrollable aircraft. If you talk to an actual flight control engineer they can give you plenty more examples of why building a safe autopilot is quite hard.
- terminalshort 1y agoAnd yet it was done decades ago. Air traffic control is just as solvable.
- nradov 1y ago"Done" in what sense? Do you even understand how autopilots work and how limited they are?
- oasisaimlessly 1y agoSo why did we have airplane autopilots decades before car autopilots if it's not easier? "Easier" != "easy"
- tjohns 1y agoAirplane autopilots are basically just cruise control. You still have a human in the loop double checking everything constantly and stepping in as soon as something isn’t routine (which is actually quite frequently).
- Aurornis 1y agoThis is such a strange comment section. Airplane autopilot is more like the cruise control feature in your car, not a self-driving computer that does everything for the pilots while they sit back. Car autopilot and airplane autopilot don't share much in common other than the word "autopilot"
- viraptor 1y agoCompletely 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 1y agoAir 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 1y agoAlso 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 1y 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.
- 1y ago
- terminalshort 1y agoSpeak for yourself. I ride in Waymos frequently.
- AniseAbyss 1y ago[dead]
- singron 1y agoIn 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 1y agoThis 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 1y agoCopenhagen has an automated metro system.
- victorbjorklund 1y agoway easier to automate than coordinating airplanes
- terminalshort 1y agoYes, but I was responding to this: "We can't even get automatic TRAINS to work reliably"
- radishingr 1y agoATC 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 1y agoAutomating 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 1y agoSo 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 1y agoTry 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 1y agoThis 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 1y agoThanks for linking that, I wasn’t aware it was that far in to development / production.
- Gathering6678 1y agoMore automation while keeping trained professionals in the loop is definitely going to help with safety. But the money comes from ... ?
- rainsford 1y agoTrusting 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.