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Imagine it were 90% automated. Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system. You're left with a bunch of planes in the sky that can't stay there
by cj 7mo ago
Imagine it were 90% automated. Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.
You're left with a bunch of planes in the sky that can't stay there forever, and not enough humans on the ground to manually land them.
Now image the outage is also happening at all airports nearby, preventing planes from diverting.
How do you get the planes out of the sky? Not enough humans to do it manually.
Now imagine the system comes back online. Does it know how to handle a crisis scenario where you have dozens of planes overhead, each about to run out of fuel? Hopefully someone thought of that edge case.
- tosapple 7mo ago[dead]
- alistairSH 7mo agoThis. Remember when all the Waymos were confused by a power outage? Now do that, but with airplanes that will fall thousands of feet and kill hundreds instead of park in the middle of the street. I'm not saying we shouldn't automate things. We should. But, it's not easy. If it was, we would have done it already.
- tanseydavid 7mo ago> Remember when all the Waymos were confused by a power outage? I remember. Do you remember (before Waymo existed) what happened to traffic in SF anytime the power went out? I remember. It was pretty much the identical situation. Traffic goes to hell when the traffic lights stop working properly (without Waymo and also with Waymo).
- alistairSH 7mo agoI think you missed the point. But sure, traffic goes to crap when the lights go out.
- bluedel 7mo agoI think the point they're making is that the failure mode of a waymo and automated air traffic control could look the same from an angle, but would have very different consequences.
- tempestn 7mo agoSpeaking of runway crossings specifically, you could have an automated backup, and require authorization from both ATC and the automated system to enter a runway.
- gretch 7mo agoIt should not be automated but it should be heavily augmented. One of the failure modes should not be “guy forgot thing”.
- ApolloFortyNine 7mo agoThat's what everyone screaming 'funding' doesn't seem to understand here. If your failure mode for potentially hundreds of people dying is one controller over radio forgetting something, then it'll happen eventually. And has happened, there's plenty of videos on youtube of near miss radio recordings. When a plan is landing at over 100mph simple good luck can take care of things the majority of the time. It just feels wrong that the primary form of control in 2026 is voice over radio.
- cyberax 7mo ago> Imagine it were 90% automated. It already is. > Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system. Planes divert to another airport, passengers grumble, end of story. Airport closures can and do happen all the time for all kinds of reasons, including weather or equipment malfunctions.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- moduspol 7mo agoWe build pacemakers, AEDs, flight control software, and other mission-critical life-and-death software. The idea that we'll just forever keep the system run by specially trained humans with known and foreseeable faults because poorly designed software could fail is head-in-sand unreasonable.
- what 7mo agoLook what happened when the power went out in SF and the Waymos just stopped in the street because they were confused and there weren’t enough humans to direct them. Now imagine that but with planes that will fall out of the sky when they run out of fuel since they can’t land. Automating this is pants on head retarded.
- moduspol 7mo agoThat sounds like a poorly thought-out implementation. An example of a poorly thought-out implementation elsewhere does not exclude the possibility of coming up with a better one than humans coordinating with their mouths over radio.