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Kind of blows my mind how primitive this whole system still is. Audio quality is really bad. They're sending instructions by voice. The way they know who is spe
by IshKebab 1y ago
Kind of blows my mind how primitive this whole system still is. Audio quality is really bad. They're sending instructions by voice. The way they know who is speaking is by just saying their callsign with every message.
There's got to be a better solution surely?
- SecretDreams 1y agoWhat's the most reliable situation you can think of that will never fail and drive better audio quality? This is a field where they need more .9999s than Amazon.
- julianlam 1y agoUnintelligible audio is a failure mode.
- tekla 1y agoSeems to work pretty well most of the time w/ souls involved. Works better than most websites on hard lines.
- lysace 1y agoThe canonical counter-example against voice/audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NDqZy4deDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NDqZy4deDI JFK controller tries to communicate with Air China 981
- tekla 1y agoYou mean a situation where a pilot who is supposed to know English in the parlance of global aviation lingo seems to be playing dumb?
- ryandrake 1y agoOne of the YouTube commenters contributed some much-needed nuance. JFK Ground added to the confusion by repeatedly refusing to use standard phraseology, and failed to maintain professionalism, getting audibly angry and impatient. Both sides of the radio conversation had problems.
- lysace 1y agoExactly, voice comms has a large number of disadvantages. Thanks for expanding on the point I was making.
- bigbuppo 1y agoAmazon is up to, what, one and half nines right now?
- montecarl 1y agoI think that the audio we are listening too is from some ground recording station that isn't necessarily near the airport. We aren't listening to a recording of what the pilots heard or what air traffic control hears.
- lysace 1y agoThis is one of the highest quality recordings of such traffic that I have heard. They are usually a lot worse.
- appreciatorBus 1y agoYup. Audio is sourced from volunteers with home radios & antennas. Quality will be dependant on how far the nearest one was from LAX and their personal setup. Not necessarily representative of quality that the controller/pilot was hearing.
- dweekly 1y agoTechnically correct...and yet let's not kid ourselves that even with a nice radio and a pair of Bose A30's, it can be hard to tease out exactly what's being said when in a congested airspace.
- aprentic 1y agohttps://www.liveatc.net/ https://www.liveatc.net/ If you want to listen in yourself.
- proteal 1y agoIt has to do with how ATC needs to be able to communicate with all planes in the air, even ones built 100 years ago. They have to use radio so everyone can hear everyone else. There’s no other technology that is as ubiquitous as radio, so they have to work with what they’ve got. Upgrading to other stuff would be an absolute nightmare, though they are making progress on less critical fronts.
- mmooss 1y agoCouldn't comms broadcast in multiple parallel modes, like cell phone traffic?: More clear (probably digital) transmissions in on band, and for backward compatibility, old radio transmissions in another.
- gosub100 1y agoI think one of the best things they could add would be an electronic drawing tablet for ATC to draw a flight path on a map and pipe it directly into the pilots EFIS or HUD. It's not fool-proof, but in high density airspace, it seems more efficient to be able to draw a curve and press a button than try to verbally describe it. Of course one major pitfall is you cannot draw in 3D.
- db48x 1y agoThat would be slower and ironically less precise than what we already have, which is navigation by named waypoints.
- gosub100 1y agoand in this case, the pilot loaded the wrong waypoint (likely from another runway) and flew toward it. It's not slower, either. have you ever entered a waypoint into a flight computer? they aren't exactly built for speed.
- IshKebab 1y agoSo this would have helped because the plane would have automatically loaded the correct route.
- 12_throw_away 1y agoRight? Just in a car, we know that talking to someone in the car itself has adverse effects on situational awareness, and talking to someone on a phone is much worse than that. But even after all the research and training that goes into human factors in aviation ... we can't do better than confusing, poor quality, AM band party lines during critical phases of flight?
- tekla 1y agoWould you rather them read text messages on their iPads?
- 12_throw_away 1y agoOh of course, those are the only two options: either an AM band party line or text messages on an iPad. Nothing else is possible.
- tekla 1y agoOpen to suggestions. Keep in mind I've worked on Aircraft control systems and have a very strong opinion on reliability and crew management. I also note that the budget isn't infinite nor do these aircraft like running electron apps. Also note that not all (if not most) aircraft are not brand new and so would need all to be retrofitted and re-rerated w/ any new system and every single pilot retrained. This requirement also includes systems for general aviation pilots and both to be able to sync with each other.
- 12_throw_away 1y ago> Also note that not all (if not most) aircraft are not brand new and so would need all to be retrofitted and re-rerated w/ any new system and every single pilot retrained Ah yes, I forgot, we never introduce new aircraft technology because it's too hard. Too bad we don't, it would be great to fit aircraft, with, say, anti-collision transponders and advanced ground proximity systems. Oh well, my mistake for even bringing it up.
- jvanderbot 1y agoI want you to very carefully consider the better options. Perhaps they type instructions? And hope someone reads them? Perhaps they drag and drop vectors? Then what, a radial menu with emergency modal screens? Or maybe they click some buttons, forcing the occasional look away from the screen? Maybe AI could do it all? For this, voice is perfect. We have been following instructions by voice since humans could grunt. We do not require anyone to look away from the screen (ATC) or look down from the window outside (pilot) for any reason. We do not require rebroadcast because everyone can hear and take initiative if required. By what interface, specifically, should someone required to fly an airplane interact with ATC while flying that airplane? By what interface should someone who needs to see where everyone is all the time be able to contact that pilot that cannot look away from the world outside ever and cannot use their hands for anything but flying at a critical time? Chesterton's ATC.
- dweekly 1y agoAs a commercial pilot, your response is a little glib and kind of ignores the meaningful advances that have been made with D-ATIS, ADS-B In, CPDLC, DUATS, XM weather, etc. Voice is absolutely not perfect, analog FM audio often comes through garbled, pilots have to wait their turn on a busy single-user channel for timely information, etc. This doesn't even begin to touch on the complexities that will come from full integration of drones and eVTOL into the national airspace, which will absolutely swamp a one-speaker-at-a-time analog FM comms system.
- jvanderbot 1y agoYeah I probably over reacted. But the knee jerk reactions I've seen to some perfectly reasonable systems just wear you down. You raise good points but I would be very surprised to see digital data streams ever replace voice, and drone control is just a completely different problem. But as you say we'll see.
- anonymousiam 1y agoJust a nit, but aircraft/airport communications use AM not FM. This is deliberate, because FM's "capture effect" would mask other transmissions that inevitably occur when two parties randomly press PTT at the same time. With AM, you'll hear a tone, which is the difference frequency between the two transmitters, so you'll know that somebody missed something, and it will probably be repeated. If it were FM only, it would be less obvious that some communications were missed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_effect
- Kim_Bruning 1y agoFor starters, ADS-B is being rolled out, allows planes to 'see' each other and respond in real time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillance%E2%80%93Broadcast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Dependent_Surveillan...
- sdh9 1y agoIt’s been required in the US since 2020. But, ADS-B would not have played a factor in this incident.
- Loughla 1y agoOther than voice how would you send instructions that don't really on changing your focus? I can listen while doing other things. What else would you do?
- fujigawa 1y agoWhat do you propose that is better? VC-backed smartphone apps? Aircraft have much better quality electronics than a $20 tabletop radio located some distance away by whoever is ripping the stream.
- evil-olive 1y ago> Audio quality is really bad. as the video says at the beginning, the audio is sourced from LiveATC, which is a network of volunteers with their own radio equipment [0] who tune in to ATC frequencies and then livestream them. those volunteers are by necessity not at the airport itself, but some distance away. and the audio is compressed to 16kbps MP3 for livestreaming purposes. this means the sound quality we're hearing is going to be worse (significantly worse, in some cases) than what the pilots and controllers actually hear. > They're sending instructions by voice. I get that it's 2025 and it's tempting to say "everything should be a text message". but remember that there's 2 pilots in the aircraft, the Pilot Flying and the Pilot Monitoring [1]. under normal circumstances, the PM handles talking to ATC (among other duties). but both pilots have headsets that allow them to hear transmissions from ATC. and crucially for the Pilot Flying, they hear those messages without taking their eyes away from actually flying. modern aircraft do have a text message system of sorts [2] but there is a very good reason why the crucial ATC instruction in this case ("turn right heading 270 immediately") happens via voice and not an ACARS message. also, it's important to remember that airline pilots in the US have a minimum of 1500 hours of flying time, and pilots flying an A330 on an LAX-Rome route probably have significantly more than that. we're watching a 5-minute video and going "oh it's a bit hard for me to follow this" but for actual commercial pilots this radio chatter is routine and something they have been practicing for years. 0: https://www.liveatc.net/faq/ https://www.liveatc.net/faq/ 1: https://skybrary.aero/articles/pilot-flying-pf-and-pilot-monitoring-pm https://skybrary.aero/articles/pilot-flying-pf-and-pilot-mon... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS
- IshKebab 1y agoThere seems to be a lack of imagination in a lot of these replies. Everyone is thinking that the only alternative to voice directions only is text messages? You only need to look at satnav to see one obvious alternative.
- upofadown 1y agoLike with all voice communications, context is important. There are only a limited number of things normally said and most transmissions are about things that were decided before the flight. Everyone involved is used to the bandwidth limited audio used here. Non-pilots have none of this context and normally have a hard time understanding these transmissions. For ATC environments the voice data is a series of pre-expected prompts. You could do something different but you would pretty much have to redesign the whole system from scratch without making things significantly more complex. Complexity is the enemy of reliability.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoPrimitive but has been working well enough for decades is so much better than the prospect of Accenture coming in with their absolutely incompetent bullshit.