Pilots, air traffic controllers shifting to text messaging | Hacker News Reader

Pilots, air traffic controllers shifting to text messaging

phys.org

12 pointsjonbaer9 comments

This tremendously helps international airspace where English is not native. I have once heard Narita tower kept interpreting comm from plane as a statement as opposed to request, until finally other plane clarified the tower that the plane is actually requesting it.

Probably a stupid question, but is English the de facto flight control language everywhere? Or is it just the safest fallback between otherwise incompatible language backgrounds?

Defacto it is, but spoken with many a accent. Try listening to some for yourself to get a feel for it - http://www.liveatc.net/

It is more the necessity of working around frequency congestion and all those other voice via radio related problems eg ("to","two","victor","vector",unameit) than a convenience change of a good working system.

Great read about that "my stetement is meant as a question" topic in the AVWeb Series "Say again". It boils down to "inflection does not work (well) via radio, add 'request' as prefix to your request".

Makes you wonder wy they did not do this 10 or 20 years ago. Or are there any obvious disadvantages?

Probably just that interactive text conversations have become "native" only recently.

My mother more or less refused to text up until 4 or 5 years ago. It had more to do with the totally novel paradigm than with any piece of the technology used to implement it.

It also has to do something with radio (voice) frequencies beeing at max capacity in high traffic areas.

It's a (underfunded) government industry - change often takes a lot of time in big companys, especially with their high demand to security and procedures.

I'd like to recommend the AVWeb series "Say again" series by Don Brown. It gives some insight in the last decades of the airspace controlling government industry and it's problems.

Example: http://www.avweb.com/news/sayagain/182641-1.html

This is especially important in managing the North Atlantic airspace, where there is no radar coverage at all. Planes request clearance and track changes via data messages.

There is a cool video detailing the process - and the software used to manage it - here: https://youtu.be/EJTjwW5ZYas?t=805

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