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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 wit

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 1y 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 1y 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 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.
- rogerrogerr 1y ago
  There are a lot of assumptions that people outside of aviation make - it reminds me of that “falsehoods programmers believe about dates and time” article that gets passed around from time to time. Off the top of my head, some easily believable falsehoods: 1. The system knows where every plane is going 2. Every plane is talking to ATC 3. Every plane that is currently taking to ATC will be reachable a minute from now 4. If you issue a plane an instruction, it will follow it 5. The planes want to go the most direct route to the destination (winds aloft can often mean direct is slower and more expensive than a more circuitous route) 6. If a plane has an emergency, they will declare an emergency. 7. Planes that are not currently talking to ATC will not fly into the regions where they are supposed to be talking to ATC 8. Planes that are not talking to ATC will not just show up and land at the airport. This happens for a variety of reasons. 9. All planes have working transponders 10. All planes are traveling from one airport and landing (once) at another. It feels like a tractable problem from the outside, but the variety of issues ATC solves every day is staggering.
  - terminalshort 1y ago
    But a lot of these assumptions that are now incorrect could easily be made true if the system was automated.
    - sokoloff 1y ago
      Worth noting in your “if the system was automated”: There are aircraft permanently without electrical systems. There are aircraft temporarily without electrical systems.
      - terminalshort 1y ago
        This is no different than the current ATC system. A plane or tower can lose power too. It's not particularly hard for the software to detect a plane that isn't in communication with the rest of the swarm / not obeying commands, assign it highest priority and GTFO of its way. The key is to have the software running on all planes (which you can do with commercial aviation) rather than rely on a centralized system with a single point of failure.
ncallaway 1y ago
> Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision Doesn't ATC also need to actually deal with vision?
- viraptor 1y ago
  Should've phrased it way better, that's true. It's a very different kind of vision when you do environment mapping and distance measuring -vs- when you do object tracking from a static location. Yes you need vision processing, but at a much higher resolution (sky is huge, planes are small) and much lower complexity. (moving objects between frames are easier to track) My point is that it's not comparable to what the cars use as vision. We've known how to do identification and known object tracking for decades (for example https://www.academia.edu/122937237/Computer_vision_system_for_airport https://www.academia.edu/122937237/Computer_vision_system_fo...)

tjohns 1y 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 1y 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 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.

rogerrogerr 1y ago
There are a lot of assumptions that people outside of aviation make - it reminds me of that “falsehoods programmers believe about dates and time” article that gets passed around from time to time. Off the top of my head, some easily believable falsehoods: 1. The system knows where every plane is going 2. Every plane is talking to ATC 3. Every plane that is currently taking to ATC will be reachable a minute from now 4. If you issue a plane an instruction, it will follow it 5. The planes want to go the most direct route to the destination (winds aloft can often mean direct is slower and more expensive than a more circuitous route) 6. If a plane has an emergency, they will declare an emergency. 7. Planes that are not currently talking to ATC will not fly into the regions where they are supposed to be talking to ATC 8. Planes that are not talking to ATC will not just show up and land at the airport. This happens for a variety of reasons. 9. All planes have working transponders 10. All planes are traveling from one airport and landing (once) at another. It feels like a tractable problem from the outside, but the variety of issues ATC solves every day is staggering.
- terminalshort 1y ago
  But a lot of these assumptions that are now incorrect could easily be made true if the system was automated.
  - sokoloff 1y ago
    Worth noting in your “if the system was automated”: There are aircraft permanently without electrical systems. There are aircraft temporarily without electrical systems.
    - terminalshort 1y ago
      This is no different than the current ATC system. A plane or tower can lose power too. It's not particularly hard for the software to detect a plane that isn't in communication with the rest of the swarm / not obeying commands, assign it highest priority and GTFO of its way. The key is to have the software running on all planes (which you can do with commercial aviation) rather than rely on a centralized system with a single point of failure.

ncallaway 1y ago

> Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision Doesn't ATC also need to actually deal with vision?

viraptor 1y ago
Should've phrased it way better, that's true. It's a very different kind of vision when you do environment mapping and distance measuring -vs- when you do object tracking from a static location. Yes you need vision processing, but at a much higher resolution (sky is huge, planes are small) and much lower complexity. (moving objects between frames are easier to track) My point is that it's not comparable to what the cars use as vision. We've known how to do identification and known object tracking for decades (for example https://www.academia.edu/122937237/Computer_vision_system_for_airport https://www.academia.edu/122937237/Computer_vision_system_fo...)