They accept public comments so all of the armchair aviation experts on HN should probably send them an email and explain how they can solve all the problems by connecting ChatGPT to a controller console.
For commerce tech, you switch, see what breaks, switch back and adjust for next try. You may have lost some sales. But probably just inconvenienced people.
When doing travel systems, something breaking is likely a lot of deaths.
There was also a lot of resistance to the idea that every aircraft should broadcast its position, heading, etc. because of privacy concerns. And as long as there are holdouts the tower can't rely on the information being available
Look at the railroad development in EU for example. You have to invent a lot of tech (signaling, communication between trains, interoperability with old systems), build a lot of infrastructure, train a lot of people and roll it out at scale with the goal of zero accidents.
It is just impossible to do quickly.
How realistic is it to have ATC performed by an AI?
Not very. For safety-critical systems, you probably want something deterministic, and doesn't break when faced with novel situations.
Solvers are probably a better solution than ML approaches, but they can't capture every possible constraint, such as airplane that can only make left-handed turns because of equipment failure.
Humans are not deterministic and can break for many reasons. It's not plausible that an AI could handle "route this aircraft for landing without any right turns" ?
Yes. Humans can also self-evaluate about their state, and have culpability. It not surprising that non-humans are held to a different standard.