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Comment by sklargh | Hacker News Reader

We do but not to the extent that laypeople would think rational. Taxi instructions are verbal affairs. Hugely problematic in very busy airports. I will say that I am not sure how much automation would have helped. It does appear that this pilot had really lost situational awareness.

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> It does appear that this pilot had really lost situational awareness.

Totally. The instructions were "taxi Bravo hold short of Kilo" and "cross 31L at Kilo"; read back was correct but instead of turning right at Kilo and crossing 31L, the pilot turned left, then right, and crossed 4L at Juliet.

Right, so going back to the question of automation, it seems like in principle a computer should be able to not only understand those instructions, but observe that the offending aircraft was deviating from those instructions and immediately alert.

KJFK has a system like this that uses a blend of radar and transponder multilateration to automatically signal to aircraft that they are about to enter an active runway. The pilot either did not see (for human or technical factors) or disregarded this system during the incursion.

What is lacking (to your point) is the ability to automatically compare ATC’s verbal instruction to the aircraft to its actual position.

I showed this in another thread, ForeFlight has taxi clearance in their Performance plan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p5-7jVg8fE

Very curious if/when they'll add speach to text/clearance. The syntax is fairly standard, so should be easy to parse, I'm just curious how tolerant folks would be of some % failure.

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