Hearing and Doing | Hacker News Reader

Hearing and Doing

planeandpilotmag.com

54 points1970-01-0136 comments

Here is my favorite ATC mouthful. Flying in the Bay Area is full of these kinds of complicated instructions that will burn anyone unfamiliar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQYZtPhK-mg

The controller expects you to hear, interpret, and read back the following clearance:

> N1234, you're cleared to airport XXX via fly runway heading until past the diamond-shaped waterway. Then turn right heading 120. Keep your turn within 2 miles of the airport. Radar vectors Woodside, then as filed. Maintain VFR conditions at or below 1100 feet until crossing the Oakland 165 radial, then climb and maintain 2100. Expect FL350 five minutes after departure. Departure frequency 135.65. Squawk 1234.

No wonder the pilots messed it up.

This isn’t that crazy of a clearance - you just have to stop, write it down and take it slow. They’re going to fast.

For weird stuff like this I’d always draw it out.

“Ok runway heading until I pass the diamond shaped waterway, then right turn to heading 120. Keep it tight.

Now thinking about altitude, 1100 or less but VFR until OAK-165R, then 2100, expect 350 in 5.

Finally, 135.65 and 6320.”

Then sit for a second and brief it, it’s not crazy. Those guys are just going to fast and they’re a little behind. But “draw it out” on a piece of paper is such an easy way to to handle these sort of situations.

When stuff like this came up, I did not give a shit about ATC flow control or whatever - if I need 30 seconds of delay to understand the clearance they can wait. Its more important that we get it right than push out 1 extra airplane but do it incorrectly and make a big mess of things.

Also, most of that should be “expected” even if it is an unfamiliar airport, because you did a flight plan and checked out the airport ahead of time, normal approaches and normal pattern.

All that information is available in the airport sheets.

And yes, you need to be willing to say “repeat”.

Yup - “all available information” is the requirement. But I’d be lying if I said I never got surprised - like, you look at the departure, you read it and understand it, then ATC gives you some crazy nonsense. Still? I ain’t paying by the word - it needs to be done right, not fast, so you make sure understand exactly or you don’t go.

New youtube rabbit hole unlocked, thanks.

In my distant past I used to be a military air traffic controller, also certified and managed civilian traffic. This seems crazy to me. In my world you would give pilots the simplest next instruction and ask them to report. Even with the simplest possible instructions, and mostly extremely good/experienced pilots, you have mistakes, can't imagine what something so complicated results in.

EDIT: though I guess this conversation isn't during the actual flight, it's some pre-flight "discussion"/instructions?

EDIT2: or you break it down to chunks, make sure every chunk is understood before you move to the next chunk, is another common technique.

For folks saying "just make it text", I think you really need to consider the human element here. Pilot->ATC text would be an absolute no go since now you'd basically be muted if it's bumpy. Instead of being able to just talk and occasionally ask for clarification, now you have to mess around with a shitty $40,000 Garmin pager device while getting bumped around and missing the buttons and typoing a bunch. Oh yeah, and you gotta also fly a plane.

A slightly reasonable system where ATC->Pilots is text and Pilots->ATC is audio is now just making the whole thing more complicated with some slight reduction of "Say again"s. You still would need to ask for clarification if the instruction is unclear or unexpected but now also ATC has to develop new workflows and a mixed text/voice system seems likely to induce higher workload and produce more errors.

Totally agree, this would not work. The ideal thing about speech and hearing is that they're really easy to multitask with. There's so many moments in the cockpit where your literally wouldn't have your hands free.

A display for visual reinforcement of basic clearances would work I guess but more as a backup. Part of the audio of ATC is not just being aware of your own traffic but also the presence and intentions of others. Putting all that on a screen would cause a lot more to monitor visually and there's so much in the instrument scanning loop already.

Easy solution: use mouthpad [1] to control the plane and free the hands to communicate with the ground. :D

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38997930

I agree it would get more complicated, but there are some nice things we could get with text.

For example, a “turn right heading 320” or “proceed direct BUXOM” could become a popup on the screen, which can then be pushed straight to the FMS with a single press. The plane could also report its active flight plan and mode (i.e., whether it’s tracking a course or following a heading) which would confirm whatever ATC expects the plane to be doing.

There’s a myriad of downsides to this, including bad actors sending instructions to pilots without ATC being aware, so in balance this might be overall worse than just keeping it simple.

the display would also need to show what's getting sent to other aircraft, because that's useful situational awareness for the pilots that would be lost if the messages were directed. accidents have been avoided by pilots noticing conflicting instructions being given by ATC

I wonder how a fine-tuned STT model running locally in the aircraft could fair vs an experienced ATC operator listening over the radio. I bet we're at the point where the speech model is more accurate.

Something I find interesting is that IMO, flight simulators handle ATC better than real life. In MSFS Obviously there isn't a human there but all messages are displayed as unambiguous text and you are able to choose various reply options based on the context.

ATC is way too complicated to completely capture in a decision tree, but the text thing seems like a no brainer, ATC/pilots should be able to deliver messages via text that is easy to send/receive so that your runway clearance and such is right on your HUD or nav screen. I don't see any reason for the ambiguity of radio in this day and age with the exception of emergencies where you need to comminuicate long specific details quickly.

For a more realistic ATC there are people who actually love ATCing simmers. Like on VAT-SIM.

It’s really not that hard - most of my career flying was single pilot IFR, and the issue was seldom confusion about the clearance - the issue I found more often was either “I was in a hurry” or “ATC was in a hurry” and we inadvertently generated confusion through mutual incompetence.

The solution is to slow down, talk clearly, and also - to be clear, there needs to be a service to deliver clearances electronically. The initial clearance should absolutely always be available as text, but on the radio in flight, I don’t see text being THAT helpful, except in cruise, but not much happens fast in cruise anyway.

I wonder to what extent cruft builds up in systems built on 'regulations written in blood'-style approaches to safety? There is always a loud proponent for another safety procedure, more explicitness, more repetition, more features and doodads, but there is rarely a proponent for removing things, even though it cannot be the case that those additions were always right & never become wrong. If there were a reset to zero of the whole airplane ecosystem, how much would just never be recreated?

Possibly a new equilibrium, but it would probably be a similar set of rules also written in blood. The tricky thing about just another extra rule, is that usually it's not a big disadvantage. But at some point, there will be just too many rules which can slow things down and cause more failures.

It would be interesting to see examples of procedures having been simplified for this reason.

Look up NOTAMs. They've gotten so crufty that there are now apps to pare them down so you can actually see the relevant ones.

The interesting thing though is that there are actually proponents for reducing NOTAM spam because aviation has recognized that alert fatigue is real. It's dangerous if you don't find out about the closed runway because your eyes glazed over after reading about the 30th 200 ft crane 8 miles from the airport.

True, the cranes are a pest now. And they're well marked anyway.

There should be a live mapping system that can just be updated on the fly IMO.

Wonder where does it come that: “Cleared for the visual, report three mile left base for Runway 31,” becomes “Cleared to land, 31” or “Line up and wait” was interpreted as “Cleared for takeoff” Maybe I fly too little as a private pilot but I can't imagine those interpretations happening.

It's pretty common for us to comprehend but not actually comprehend something if it's mundane.

Our brains are lazy and put stuff on autopilot when it can, so stuff that we experience very often and regularly gets truncated and simplified and shuffled off to be auto'd away so our brain can do better things.

For an IT example, it's common knowledge that dialog boxes and windows are almost always instantaneously closed by hitting the OK button. It doesn't matter what it's saying, it's just second nature to just OK it away because that's what we do with them. Even as we try to read it our hand is already clicking the OK button.

And so "Cleared for the visual, report three mile left base for Runway 31" becomes "Cleared, Runway 31" in our minds and we end up with incidents.

My perception is that General aviation is mostly stuck in 1950ies when it comes to technology and we might be seeing an issue where the real issue is the limit of verbal communication to be unambiguous enough for modern standards.

It would be fairly easy to replace the whole hear/repeat with an system of unambiguous text messages using hardware not much more expansive the cost of an tank full of avgas for the average plane but it seems like people still try to solve this by regulating the already crowded radio frequencies with more verbose instructions.

There is highly standardized phraseology though, through lessons learned from the terrible Avianca disaster and others.

It's absolutely nothing like the 1950s. ATC controllers didn't even have visibility of most aircraft movement back then. They relied on pilots self-reporting and the phraseology was unclear. Many lives were lost due to this.

The tech is still AM radio but this I believe is mainly selected due to its reliability in poorer radio conditions.

AM is worse than FM in every imaginable way but one - in AM you can hear if two people transmit at the same time. In the FM the stronger signal completely suppresses the weak one which can be dangerous because a pilot or the ATC could miss some radio traffic and not be even aware of it.

> “Cleared for the visual, report three mile left base for Runway 31,” becomes “Cleared to land, 31” in our mind, even though we read back the visual and report instructions.

Has anyone here ever given driving instructions while sitting beside the driver? Say “In half a mile, turn right” or “Turn right half a mile down the road” and get the reply “Turn right here? OK!” driver turns immediately

> it was expected that we knew where the runway was and would call the tower for takeoff in due course > But pilots botched up from time to time, blundering into blind-alley taxiways or heading across an active runway. So taxi instructions gradually got more complex and wordy

Amusingly there's now Foreflight so you really shouldn't need directions now unless there's some unpublished barrier to getting there via the shortest route. I imagine this adaptation to previous issues is now a contributing factor to present issues.

If you blunder onto an active runway you've really missed a lot of cues like big flashing red lights.

I've never used foreflight though. It doesn't seem to be very common here in GA.

All of my instructors and all of the people in my clubs have used ForeFlight. I’ve heard it’s less common in Europe but it seems pretty ubiquitous in Florida at least.

Oh I see. Yeah I'm in Europe. I've never seen anyone at the flying club using it.

Getting older has consequences.

Flying isn't cheap, the average private pilot is just under 50, and with the prices of planes, fule, maintenance, and storage costs add up. And that's after you've already dropped over 10K just to learn how.

Yeah I think this is why pilots are getting older. It's so expensive that they are doing it after the kids are out of college etc

"line up and wait" is no less declarative than "position and hold", and has the advantage of not being confused with "hold short". Who is confusing "line up and wait" with "cleared for takeoff", and are they really any less likely to have been confused with "position and hold"?

It shouldn't be confused because the word 'takeoff' is only ever given together with a clearance due to terrible mistakes in the past.

Even a pilot wouldn't say the word takeoff, it would be 'ready for departure'.

Agreed. The change was made to conform to ICAO standards[1], which the article alludes to, but doesn't examine the implications of remaining unstandardized. Surely having different phraseology in the US is a separate risk and cognitive burden!

To me the main issue is not "wait" vs "hold"... it's that either way, pilots may misremember having been issues the takeoff clearance. The best defense against this, IMHO, is ground radar to detect the movement as early as possible.

[1]: https://www.faa.gov/airports/runway_safety/resources/luaw

Regardless of nomenclature, it is the PROCESS of entering the runway environment but not immediately starting takeoff that is confusing and should be eliminated.

No aircraft should ever be sitting still on a runway blind to landing traffic behind them. The time saved by eliminating the short taxi from the hold short line to the runway is not worth the additional risk incurred, either the risk of taxiing to position and failing to hold, or taxiing to position and holding while you get rearended by a landing aircraft.

> The time saved … is not worth the additional risk

The time saved is most definitely required for certain airports to maintain their current traffic levels. So we would need a study to understand if the economic impact of the reduced traffic from eliminating line up and wait is worth the expected reduction in accidents.

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