FAA Traffic Flow Management Design Challenge | Hacker News Reader

FAA Traffic Flow Management Design Challenge

faa-tfm-aid.nianet.org

37 pointsabrax314114 comments

> Prize: A trophy with the winning university’s name, participating students’ names, and date of award will be displayed at an FAA facility, and a display copy of the trophy will be sent to the lead academic institution. The lead university will be presented with an award of $25,000 and finalist student will each receive a copy of the winning certificate.

...and quoting from FAA's FY 2023 budget submission[1]:

> For FY 2023, the FAA’s budget request of $18.6 billion represents an increase of 3.3 percent from the FY 2022 Continuing Resolution (CR) level. When combined with the $5 billion in advanced annual appropriations under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the total FY 2023 funding for FAA is $23.6 billion. This funding level allows the FAA to make continued investments to safeguard the most complex airspace in the world while transforming our aviation infrastructure.

What a joke.

[1] https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2022-04/F...

If anyone is curious as to what the existing TFMS GUI looks like, NIA has provided the following document which contains some screenshots.

https://faa-tfm-aid.nianet.org/wp-content/uploads/Traffic-Fl...

It is an interesting idea to use these in mock-ups for the TFMS replacement as long as they were example and not hard HF/CHI requirements.

I would not trust college students with no experience in HF/CHI to create GUI requirements for a mission critical application like TFMS. While it is not safety critical, traffic flow management is mission critical.

Based on my interpretation of the post I think the FAA will probably select aspects from the various submissions they receive and try to incorporate them into their proposal requirements. So I do not think the students will exactly have a direct hand in the creation of FMDS, that will most likely be up to whatever company wins the contract (https://sam.gov/opp/a3e83f9e32d443b6bdd143ded9612916/view).

Why make this a contest with basically no prize to extract free labor from inexperienced students?

Why not, say, hire some actual experts?

It's particularly insulting because no one could be bothered to come up with a useful, interesting problem description that is not loaded to the hilt with acronyms of systems that are only ever relevant to their current system:

> If the TFM strategy involves a GDP, AFP, or CTOP, FMDS allocates arrival slots for the constrained resource to NAS users and computes Expect Departure Clearance Times (EDCTs) for all included flights that are still on the ground.

While we are here... where on earth is the reference/demo data? How do they expect anyone to make a visualization going purely from verbose specs?

Aviation is loaded with these acronyms. It's their technical jargon.

Communicating lots of information in minimal time seems to be really important to them for some reason...

Here's some good resources for looking up acronyms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation,_avionics,_ae...

https://nbaa.org/aircraft-operations/airspace/tfm/glossary-o...

https://www.allacronyms.com/aviation/abbreviations

https://www.abbreviationfinder.org/

I worked on FAA systems for a while, mostly FDIO (Fight Data Input Output, aggravatingly pronounced Fido by controllers), where we couldn't even just refer to a monitor and keyboard as such, had to go and call them a RANK (Replaceable Alpha Numeric Keyboard) and CRT (in spite of them long since having moved away from Cathode Ray Tube technology)

Ha, I am not a controller but I have always called FDIO "Fido". Never heard of RANK or CRT though, probably to be expected since there are so many different systems in the NAS, each with its own unique terminology.

Design competitions are an extremely common way to facilitate job placement for students. It filters out the uninterested, develops skills, and connects employers with first-time job seekers. It costs almost nothing and everyone benefits. The work product is often irrelevant.