https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/air-transport/2025-0...
https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/CASMATEO/bulletins/...
"The FAA has awarded a new contract for air traffic services at SQL to Robinson Aviation (RVA). However, the contract does not include locality pay to account for the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a result, RVA’s employment offers to current SQL controllers were significantly lower than their current compensation under SERCO. Understandably, all current controllers have declined RVA’s offers."
"Given that the FAA is ultimately responsible for ensuring air traffic services at SQL, we requested temporary FAA staffing for the tower—a solution currently being implemented at Eagle Airport in Colorado during its transition from SERCO to RVA. However, the FAA informed us this morning that they will not provide temporary personnel for SQL"
I sympathize with the ATC workers though. It's ridiculous that they can't pay them a decent wage for the area, there's only two of them as far as I know.
Now they want to go with an even bottomer-of-the-barrel contractor? That's not going to work at all.
Doesn't that just mean there will be no taxi control? My understanding is that ATC isn't in the tower. The tower staff just give clearances for take-off and directions on which runway to land/take-off. In radio clips, you can hear ATC hand-off a plane to tower.
When you say ATC I believe you’re thinking of tracon controllers, a level of airspace up from towers who control approach and departures and then hand you off to/from the tower. Above them there’s yet another level, center controllers. All of these are ATC though.
The "tower" controller manages the actual runways, and the airspace within several miles of the airport laterally and a few thousand feet vertically (varying at each airport). This includes sequencing all the planes that want to take off of land there, and everybody maneuvering around that immediate area.
For the large airports that mostly big airliner flights, that sequencing is largely worked out by the approach controllers dozens or hundreds of miles ahead of time. So there's a steady stream of planes following standardized approach procedures at just the right distance apart.
Outside of the ~30 busiest airports in the country though, there is also a lot of general aviation in small planes. They want to transition through that airspace, or do a dozen laps around the "pattern" to practice landings, etc. Even at fairly major airports, there's plenty of GA activity. For example at Burbank, Ontario, John Wayne, Long Beach, San Jose, Oakland, etc in California. It's only really SFO and LAX where that doesn't really happen, because they set fees to shoo the peons away.
SQL is a small but very busy airport that is almost exclusively GA. There are several flight schools there with multiple planes each, and it's sandwiched in complicated airspace between SFO, SJC, OAK, and open bay.
The tower at this kind of airport is doing a delicate dance keeping multiple planes buzzing around in a rectangular pattern all day every day. Some of which are faster than others. Less frequently a larger much faster plane wants to get in or out and they're getting handed off from approach. Helicopters are doing tours and wanting to cross through. And a lot of the people flying are students that are new at this, don't know how to talk or listen on the radio right yet, make mistakes following directions, etc.
With the tower closed, all those people have to coordinate on a party-line radio with each other about where they are, what they're doing, etc to hopefully not hit anyone. So yeah... it's possible, but it's going to be a mess, and that's why tiny airports like this with virtually no commercial passenger service have a tower.
Also if you're leaving the immediate area, someone at the airport (ground, tower, or "clearance delivery", depending) normally will coordinate putting your destination (for visual/VFR flight following) or full route (for IFR/instruemnt) into the ATC systems before you takeoff so that you can talk to the approach controllers once you leave and they can provide you traffic advisories, etc.
With nobody at the tower to do that, you have to "cold call" approach once already airborne. Or if your route allows, just not get flight following at all (and then ATC has no way to reach you). So SQL tower closing will also add to the workload for the SFO/OAK approach area.
Seems tenable for a GA airport in rural Wyoming but that is far too close to a major hub.
With that said - algorithmic, automated, and digital systems for collision avoidance at the very minimum have and could continue to make ATC jobs significantly easier. The radio voice channel is a particularly low fidelity, low bandwidth way to mete out information and directives.
Operating rooms, certain military/police situations and self driving cars come to mind. A shared characteristic here is that errors lead to fatal outcomes exacerbated by unclear accountability.
The helicopter pilot asked multiple times for permission to assume liability for visually avoiding the plane in the approach path, and the tower warned about the plane, and he confirmed he could see it. Several times, he insisted he had it in his sights, and it was not on a collision course, and requested and was granted permission to continue through the flight path on that basis. And he did successfully avoid that dot in the sky.
He was looking at the dot in the sky that was about 60 seconds behind the plane that he ultimately collided with.
If that is the case, there is certainly a chance that an automated warning signal from an automated tracking network (not "you're within five miles of another aircraft on the map, watch out" but "your current 3d trajectory is within ten seconds of collision with another aircraft") may have averted this. That isn't AI, it's just having the plane keep secondary track of ADS-B inside the cockpit. And it sounds from a cursory search like it's already standard for commercial planes to have an ADS-B receiver and a Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS), just maybe not 1980's military helicopters.
(* CPDLC does allow ATC to send texts to/from larger aircraft, but this is only used for things that aren't time sensitive. Voice is still the primary method of control.)
Usually this is done for rural airports, where you have one controller potentially managing multiple low traffic airports, and it’s tough to get ATC willing to move to remote locations. The only busy airport doing this kind of thing is London City Airport, but that has 3M passengers a year and DCA has 25M. That was motivated by the lack of space at London City Airport, so they demolished the traditional tower to reallocate space.
London City implementation: https://www.nats.aero/news/london-city-is-first-major-airpor...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Wide_Information_Manage...
https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/atiec/me...
I guess AI can work while the lights are on, but if this is your backstop scenario, you still need the meat ATC controllers, and they really need to know their stuff.
So for example, a plane can have a "missed approach and go around" when trying to land. I was once on a plane that did that because of extremely high winds. In that case, the plane that was supposed to be on the ground is suddenly climbing again and is going to need to turn in order to repeat the approach.
A plane can have a medical emergency onboard, so it needs to land at an unexpected airport, possibly faster than a normal landing, or starting from a somewhat atypical position. I was once on a plane that did that because someone onboard had a seizure.
A plane can have damage or equipment failures that the pilots find it hard to assess directly, so it needs to fly around for a while to give the pilots time to "run checklists" or perform various tests, or sometimes to let a ground-based observer report on something about the plane (!), or just to develop their intuition about how functional the plane is. It might then need to land at an unintended airport or return unexpectedly to its takeoff airport. I was once on a plane that did that because of bird strikes during departure, where the plane was damaged but the pilots were unsure how seriously.
A pilot might misunderstand something or disobey regulations, and that pilot or another pilot might be told to take some unexpected evasive action to avoid a collision. (This is one area that has been productively automated in some cases via TCAS, where the aircraft themselves can sometimes figure out what an appropriate maneuver would be before a controller tells them one.) I haven't personally experienced that.
There might be another kind of emergency where a runway is closed and a large number of planes need to be diverted (like right after this collision where DCA was abruptly closed).
There might be negotiations with an uncooperative or mentally ill pilot (like the tragic story of Richard Russell in 2018, but also a number of incidents that had happier endings).
Pilots might also negotiate more cooperatively with ATC related to diversions and priority in situations like bad weather, where the airport has less capacity than originally expected and the pilots need to determine whether they will divert to a different airport. In this case the air traffic controllers may talk to different pilots about their fuel levels and other factors that make them better and worse candidates for changing flight plans. En-route (ARTCC/ACC) controllers will also negotiate with pilots about changing altitude to reduce or avoid turbulence.
There are occasionally cases where a pilot is incapacitated and someone with less training and experience needs to be advised remotely on how to land a plane. (This is mostly very small planes but ATC will still ultimately deal with these emergencies.) In that case other planes also need to be kept away from the incident aircraft and maybe diverted elsewhere.
Specifically for takeoff and landing, there are often multiple planes using the same runway (for takeoff, landing, or both) in relatively quick succession, or possibly using runways that cross each other. In this case, a controller needs to keep an eye on how quickly pilots have (or haven't) complied with specific clearances, e.g. to cross a runway on the ground, because the clearances may need to be revoked or modified if they aren't used quickly enough (because of the presence of other aircraft that have also received clearances that will soon start to conflict with the older clearances). This also includes checking whether planes that have landed have vacated the runway expeditiously (since if they haven't done so, for whatever reason, other planes may soon need to be told to go around).
There are also cases where military or law enforcement authorities may ask or demand to modify normal ATC procedures or clearances because of some special operation or problem. The simplest case is that they might ask to prioritize a government aircraft over civilian flights for some reason, or ask certain other operations to stop e.g. during a takeoff or landing of Air Force One. (I just watched this a few days ago with an Air Force One departure from Las Vegas, where other departures and landings were temporarily but briefly suspended. So that had to be planned and communicated to various pilots, some of whom then had follow-up questions about what they were or weren't allowed to do.)
Pilots are also considered to have ultimate responsibility for the safety of their flights and passengers, and they can also refuse some ATC instructions, or deviate from some normal procedures, in emergencies. So for example, a controller might believe it's safe to land in certain weather conditions and might give a pilot a certain clearance, but the pilot might not feel up to completing the landing and might then refuse to do so. The controller will have to understand the pilot's intentions as best as possible, and deal with the consequences of those intentions (e.g., once again, keeping other planes out of the way, or trying to find a new routing that the pilot will be willing to accept).
ATC is also responsible for passing some kinds of information to and from other parties, like in case of an emergency landing communicating with emergency responders so that they understand the nature of the emergency and whatever facts will help them respond more effectively. And they have to tell other ATC facilities about problems and situations that will affect them, like in-flight emergencies, closed airspace, closed runways, closed airport, etc.
Many of these things can and should be more automated than they are, but humans in these jobs are doing enormous amounts of reasoning, improvisation, and even social negotiation.
(I'm not a pilot or air traffic controller, just a former frequent flyer who liked listening to ATC communications and sometimes listens to liveatc.net when friends' flights are arriving or departing, or watches video recaps of various aviation incidents.)
Edit: Another case that I thought of: during an emergency landing, a pilot might be given either a shorter (more direct) or longer (more indirect) route than usual, in response to the pilot's assessment of which would be safer. The pilot could also be given a longer route than usual in order to have time to "work checklists" in preparation for the landing, or in order to burn off fuel so that the plane will weigh less (and be less likely to cause a huge fire) upon landing.
If some navigation equipment is broken, the ATC facility could help with navigation or with diagnosing the problem (by describing visual landmarks, or by estimating the plane's current speed and heading based on ATC radar).
Now a copilot e.g. ATC audio parsed by an LLM into intended tracks, requests from traffic, integrated into the scope with projections for future separation etc…
> Thanks for reaching out! As you probably know, crashing an aeroplane is not generally recommended. There are many factors that may contribute to a crash, such as weather, technical malfunction or human error. Appropriate training, regular maintenance and flight planning are some of the best practices which help minimise the likelihood of a crash. I recommend revisiting these factors. Is there anything else I can help you with today?
It's utterly ridiculous to expect humans to do this job for much longer. It's what computers are for.
For that matter, next time you visit the Bay Area, drop by the CHM in Mountain View and take a look at what SAGE could already do in the 1960s.
https://www.opm.gov/media/zkebfxow/omb-opm-federal-civilian-...
If someone in your scenario had accepted the offer and was going to start last week, they would not have been included in the hiring freeze and would have been able to start.
> Job offers made prior to noon on January 20, 2025, for which the individual has accepted the position and has a designated start date on or before February 8, 2025. Those individuals should report to work according to their respective designated start date.
but it does illustrate the type of future incident that it _could_ be causal of
So I took their comment to be forward-looking.
It's worth adding that Elon Musk's email that had the supposed "buyout" went to ATC folks -- however management was telling them they'd need to work through their resignation date, regardless, removing the point of it. Then again, Musk denied the buyout will work this way, that agencies can just do whatever they want on this and OPM seems to agree, so who knows.
Trains are on tracks. They basically move in one dimension. And the tracks can have (near) contact-based sensors along the way where the exact distance is known. (And in the US, there still is human conducting in a lot of the US)
That’s a very different problem space than the three dimension, unattached, space that air traffic moves in.
E.g. On 9/11 ATC had to land almost 3000 planes in 1 hour. I'm not sure if that sort of national coordinated grounding is part of ATC training, but it's certainly not something I'd want to leave to some code that has never needed to run in production before.
In your imaginary system how is the software "tower" communicating with airplanes, using voice? I don't think we even have software that can reliably decode the variety of human voices over radio that a controller can respond to.
One can imagine a digital protocol to all airplanes but technology works its way really slowly into aviation.
Planes around airports come in from all directions in three dimensions, and there can be hundreds of arrivals per hour.
These are vastly different scales of problem domain.
In the middle of nowhere. A metro track can have a train every 60s.
But it's still entirely fixed, with easy to deploy sensors on both the tracks and trains.
> there can be hundreds of arrivals per hour
Serious question: Why is 3D such a hard problem for modern computers? I could imagine a plane enters a cylinder of airspace near the airport and automatically communicates by radio waves information about itself. Then, HAL9000 can provide guidance as a landing plan.
And then if you have people flying the planes, you have to deal with people mostly _but not always_ doing the right thing. So now you build out a plan and have to deal with consequences of that.
So at the end of the day you're still looking at funneling humans into a thing. At worst you could consider ATC as "customer support", there to press buttons on machines to actually handle a bunch of logistics because the pilots need to figure things out.
On top of all of this, airports are trying to get through a lot of flights quickly. So people can make snap judgements about whether planes can or cannot advance, what they should do, etc. No matter how well your plan is, the instant a pilot mishears something it's over.
If we can figure out self-driving cars, maybe we can talk about replacing pilots with AIs. But in the meantime there's somebody not following the plan often enough.
This does lead to an interesting question for me, though: what is the biggest "human movement" system that is actually entirely hands-off logistics? I would imagine that postal service companies are doing a lot but every major person moving operation seems pretty hands-on from the outside.
There's currently a human in the loop at almost all times but a great many planes are already self-flying. Autopilots are a thing, and have been for decades. Modern airliners routinely land themselves, and Garmin have developed an emergency landing system for general aviation aircraft which can handle everything including selecting an airport and communicating with ATC in the case of the pilot being incapacitated.
In many ways a self-piloting plane is an easier problem to solve than self-driving cars. Every plane has (or will have in the near future) a beacon on it transmitting it's location to every other plane around it to allow collision avoidance, and the procedure for getting from one major airport to another is pretty much prescribed in the form of standard departures, arrivals, and airways. The big difference of course is that if a car on the road breaks down and the AI can't handle it then the car can just stop, and baring someone not noticing and plowing into the back of them everyone will be fine, while if that happens in a plane it's a matter of time until the thing falls out of the sky killing everyone on board.
But sure. It’s a mild exaggeration. It still doesn’t change the core point.
3D isn’t just “magically hard” for computers, but the process for routing traffic is wildly complex and a bunch of planes arriving and leaving at semi-random times, directions, and with different requirements and capabilities is where the problem starts not finishes.
The happy path is relatively easy. The exceptions are innumerable.
And ATL is a crazy busy airport (there's an old doc on Netflix I think which is interesting). To confirm your question, ATL can run 5 runways nearly continuously[2]. It would be interesting to know what they peak at during a busy Monday morning, but my guess is they are more constrained by gate space at this point.
[1] https://newatlas.com/us-navy-ouija-board/50087/ [2] https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-econom...
Maybe I'm getting older. Maybe it is a more modern phenomena, enabled by a steady diet of 30 second videos.
Either way, I'm quite disturbed, regularly, recently, by the # of people who breezily stumble through quarter-baked thoughts while speaking dismissively, as if they've covered the surface of a complex universe that has been worked on very many smart people for decades, and now we can get to the real singular problem that'd fix everything, the one thing they've identified.
I don't even know where to begin trying to interlocute when the starting premise is "3D is hard for modern computers."
So I speak straightforwardly, in a way that I wish wouldn't be seen as rude, but it is.
So it goes.
You're right about the arrivals, but you missed the forest for the trees in the comment you're replying to.
And the framing of "3d" is a reasonable followup to the train comparison.
Are you implying your reply would make the previous post become dismissive?
Here, "it" means "your involvement in this discussion"
To put it a bit more plainly, and apologies if it is hard to hear currently, I'd find this very helpful to hear this if I were you:
- The first comment was objectively, straightforwardly, dismissive. You questioned one statistic, then ignored the thrust of the comment and the comments leading up to it, instead framing the difficulty as "modern computers have a hard time with 3D", eliding the main point communicated.
- You then replied to my comment to tell me I'm wrong, it wasn't dismissive. This is also, in itself, dismissive. I had already fisked you, and I felt bad, so I didn't want to get overly literal and criticize you roughly again, in front of a crowd, so soon. So, I choose to keep it brief, rely on your ability to recognize the irony in your reply being dismissive in telling me the original comment wasn't dismissive, especially when combined with the wink.
To be hyper clear, it's...unusual...when communicating with others to ignore most of what they just said and fixate on one illustrative part of what they said, then when told you were being dismissive, to just say "I wasn't being dismissive" and put the burden on the listener. It's so unusual as to be objectively amusing.
You certainly did not mean to be dismissive, but you were. I sympathize with the reflex, I am 100% sure I've made many similar errors in my own journey, probably more than you ever have and will. It is a problem area for me.
With humility, I'd humbly suggest that when given feedback, rather than briefly asserting the feedback is incorrect, you come with curiosity and ask why it came off that way.
Given their answer, you'll be able to tell very quickly if the person is having a bad day/picking on you, or if you were unclear.
Your advice would make sense if I was the same person, but if I was the same person I would have responded very differently to the criticism. I gave a brief reply because I'm a third party.
Oh and thousands of lives hang in the literal balance
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19750022064/downloads/19...
>4D AREA NAVIGATION SYSTEM DESCRIPTION AND FLIGHT TEST RESULTS
>A 4D area navigation system was designed to guide aircraft along a prespecified flight path (reference path) such that the aircraft would arrive at the approach gate at a time specified by the ATC controller. Key components to achieve this requirement were:
>(1) stored reference trajectories;
>(2) a continuously recomputed capture trajectory to a selected waypoint on the reference trajectory so as to achieve the desired time of arrival;
>(3) electronic situation displays; and (4) a control system to follow the overall trajectory in space and time.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19750015477
>Four-dimensional guidance algorithms for aircraft in an air traffic control environment
>Theoretical development and computer implementation of three guidance algorithms are presented. From a small set of input parameters the algorithms generate the ground track, altitude profile, and speed profile required to implement an experimental 4-D guidance system. Given a sequence of waypoints that define a nominal flight path, the first algorithm generates a realistic, flyable ground track consisting of a sequence of straight line segments and circular arcs. Each circular turn is constrained by the minimum turning radius of the aircraft. The ground track and the specified waypoint altitudes are used as inputs to the second algorithm which generates the altitude profile. The altitude profile consists of piecewise constant flight path angle segments, each segment lying within specified upper and lower bounds. The third algorithm generates a feasible speed profile subject to constraints on the rate of change in speed, permissible speed ranges, and effects of wind. Flight path parameters are then combined into a chronological sequence to form the 4-D guidance vectors. These vectors can be used to drive the autopilot/autothrottle of the aircraft so that a 4-D flight path could be tracked completely automatically; or these vectors may be used to drive the flight director and other cockpit displays, thereby enabling the pilot to track a 4-D flight path manually.
https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/stories/2020-12-4d-tbo-a-...
>4D-TBO: a new approach to aircraft trajectory prediction
>How four-dimensional trajectory data could contribute to aviation decarbonisation targets
>The real-time transmission of four-dimensional trajectory data has the incredible potential to greatly improve an aircraft’s trajectory prediction. By reducing the inaccuracy of current air traffic management (ATM) prediction models by approximately 30-40%, the Trajectory Based Operations in 4 Dimensions (4D-TBO) project is helping to pave the way to a more sustainable management of tomorrow’s air traffic.
https://skybrary.aero/articles/4d-trajectory-concept
>The 4D trajectory of an aircraft consists of the three spatial dimensions plus time as a fourth dimension. This means that any delay is in fact a distortion of the trajectory as much as a level change or a change of the horizontal position. Tactical interventions by air traffic controllers rarely take into account the effect on the trajectory as a whole due to the relatively short look-ahead time (in the order of 20 minutes or so).
>The implementation of 4D trajectory management is being researched by SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) in the EU and NextGen in the US.
>The 4D trajectory concept is based on the integration of time into the 3D aircraft trajectory. It aims to ensure flight on a practically unrestricted, optimum trajectory for as long as possible in exchange for the aircraft being obliged to meet very accurately an arrival time over a designated point.
How many options are there for handling emergencies with aircraft now? You pretty much just have either land ASAP or circle to burn fuel and then land.
Ah, there it is. "How hard could coordinating takeoff and landing for thousands of flights be? You just..."
I’ve heard ATC swap landing and takeoff directions in the space of 10 minutes because of weather
> This order does not apply to military personnel of the armed forces or to positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety.
ATC surely falls under public safety. Additionally, the ATC issues stretch well back into the Biden term, and you can find plenty of articles discussing the controversy elsewhere.
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily...
Everyone obviously wants to use critical services as a shield to avoid scrutiny on them. But by all indications the administration was ready to go on day 1, and insofar as stuff is being cut or halted a decision was made to allow that to happen.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/01/omb-whi...
There's no other way to just ... figure it out? You know, by studying the situation?
And when has “studying the situation” ever worked to make the government stop wasting money destroying the Middle East? Obama promised to change this stuff, and he couldn’t do it, because he innately trusted the same people who made the mistakes to “study” how to fix them.
They're manufacturing consent to a massive power grab from Congress. The consent to an American King is being manufactured in front of our very eyes.
> President Trump signed an executive order instituting the freeze on Monday shortly after his inauguration, but allowed for exceptions for positions related to immigration enforcement, national security or public safety.
Important to read the details! There will be lots of misinformation as people invoke the minority of critical jobs as cover to defend the less critical ones.