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Comment by Abekkus | Hacker News Reader

We can’t trust general use self driving cars yet. Air traffic control is a bit riskier than that

Completely different things. Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead. Comparing their risk is a complete apples and oranges situation.

Than again, ATC needs to deal with people talking on the radio, so the current system has a really long way to go to be completely automated.

Air traffic also requires the use of visual skills - and it’s harder than driving because of the small target size and wide field of view.

“See and avoid” has a very high priority in the cockpit - not everything out there is on radar, not everything on radar is under ATC control.

Also remember that ATC is vital for emergency situations. "Your distress call is important to us, please continue screaming into the void and hopefully a miracle happens.

> Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead.

It's funny to read all of these confident comments claiming ATC is easily automated from people who obviously don't understand what ATC entails.

ATC isn't just planning and scheduling. There is a lot of quick thinking and communication with pilots. You might only be thinking of the everything-goes-perfectly-right case, but the real value of having trained ATC operators is handling all of the edge cases and making quick decisions under high pressure scenarios that may not have even been represented in the training set.

ATC is also partially a visual job. Did you ever notice that there's literally a tower at the airport for air traffic control people? The people in this tower will manage things like traffic on the ground and immediate airspace around the tower. Visual inputs and critical thinking skills are very necessary.

There are a lot of assumptions that people outside of aviation make - it reminds me of that “falsehoods programmers believe about dates and time” article that gets passed around from time to time. Off the top of my head, some easily believable falsehoods:

1. The system knows where every plane is going

2. Every plane is talking to ATC

3. Every plane that is currently taking to ATC will be reachable a minute from now

4. If you issue a plane an instruction, it will follow it

5. The planes want to go the most direct route to the destination (winds aloft can often mean direct is slower and more expensive than a more circuitous route)

6. If a plane has an emergency, they will declare an emergency.

7. Planes that are not currently talking to ATC will not fly into the regions where they are supposed to be talking to ATC

8. Planes that are not talking to ATC will not just show up and land at the airport. This happens for a variety of reasons.

9. All planes have working transponders

10. All planes are traveling from one airport and landing (once) at another.

It feels like a tractable problem from the outside, but the variety of issues ATC solves every day is staggering.

nevermind misread it.

But a lot of these assumptions that are now incorrect could easily be made true if the system was automated.

Worth noting in your “if the system was automated”: There are aircraft permanently without electrical systems. There are aircraft temporarily without electrical systems.

This is no different than the current ATC system. A plane or tower can lose power too. It's not particularly hard for the software to detect a plane that isn't in communication with the rest of the swarm / not obeying commands, assign it highest priority and GTFO of its way. The key is to have the software running on all planes (which you can do with commercial aviation) rather than rely on a centralized system with a single point of failure.

> The key is to have the software running on all planes

Yeeeeah… we just went through the ADS-B mandate. It took a decade or more, cost pilots thousands and thousands of dollars, still doesn’t have 100% compliance, and does weird stuff sometimes. And this was orders of magnitude easier than any kind of two way system.

Respectfully, do you have any time in the front seat of an aircraft or a tower/TRACON position?

I have none. Did the engineers who developed autopilots start out as pilots? Did the people who invented email start out delivering mail for the post office? The point is that the new system doesn't have to look like the old system. Automating ATC isn't going to be the current ATC system, just done by computer. That makes about as much sense as designing driverless cars with a humanoid robot as driver.

ATC here. One of my favorites is:

11. Planes have radios that can select all ten digits.

Someone's radio broke where they couldn't enter '2' into it, so we had to find frequencies along their path that they could use and where ATC could relay.

Opposing Bases a few weeks ago had feedback from someone who had a button on their transponder that didn’t work and needed a code without any 5’s in it. Good luck getting _that_ through to auto-ATC.

Can emit all bytes except for 00000101 isn't really the type of problem you see in a digital system. And even if it were, it's pretty simple.

plane 1 > assign code 4563

plane 2 > reject

plane 1 > assign code 0827

plane 2 > accept

Also assigning short codes like that isn't something likely to be necessary in an automated protocol like this. Why not just have every message sent between 2 planes include a sender_id: UUID header?

Because now we’re talking about putting deeply integrated equipment in every plane. It’s a certification and cost nightmare.

This is not a system where you get to do clean slate greenfield development. Whatever you do must work for the lowest common denominator. ATC is a fairly cheap societal expense compared to developing, certifying, installing, and maintaining systems with the level of integration you want in hundreds of thousands of diverse planes.

There are only 35,000 commercial planes on Earth. Even if installing costs $1 million per plane, that's only $35 billion.

The US has about 200,000 general aviation planes. You can’t ignore them, and you can’t just ban GA because that’s your pipeline for getting commercial pilots.

You are thinking about automating the existing system, but the current system is entirely defined by the constraint that it must be operated by humans on radios. When this constraint can be removed so are its specific edge cases. When your phone communicates with the cell tower a frequency also must be assigned, and no buttons have to be pressed to do it.

> read all of these confident comments claiming ATC is easily automated

You responded to the wrong comment then. I did not say in any place it would be easy. Just that they're very different class of problems. Nether did I say it's only planning and scheduling. Even the vision part is very different than cars. (Static in known environment vs dynamic in entirely random one)

You're arguing against others or a straw man here.

> Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision

Doesn't ATC also need to actually deal with vision?

Should've phrased it way better, that's true. It's a very different kind of vision when you do environment mapping and distance measuring -vs- when you do object tracking from a static location. Yes you need vision processing, but at a much higher resolution (sky is huge, planes are small) and much lower complexity. (moving objects between frames are easier to track) My point is that it's not comparable to what the cars use as vision.

We've known how to do identification and known object tracking for decades (for example https://www.academia.edu/122937237/Computer_vision_system_fo...)

There’s a lot of automation that can be done to reduce the workload of controllers.

Making an autopilot for airplanes is significantly easier than cars.

But the stakes are much higher.

On a side note, I will use this thread to air out my biggest pet peeve - air travel isn't in fact safer than car travel. Well, it is, per mile, but that's cheating because planes travel so fast. Obviously a 3 hour commercial flight is safer than 40 hours of driving. But cars are still safer per journey.

So, if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, your car ride wasn't actually more dangerous than your flight as the saying goes. The only road-based transportion more dangerous than a plane is the bicycle.

Commercial air travel has a passenger fatality on something like one in ten million flights [0], and less than that on newer aircraft.

Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. [1]

So maybe you are technically correct. Barely. And it has nothing to do with airplanes being fast — planes only need to go a few tens of miles per trip to be significantly safer than cars, and plane trips are a lot longer than that.

[0] https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm

[1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...

> Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles.

Which is vanishingly small.

It means the average driver can expect to be a fatality in an automobile accident once ever one to two hundred years or more.

If you drive a fairly typical 12.5K miles per year, it will take you 8000 years to drive 100M miles.

“Or more” technically includes a factor of 20-80x, but I think you were way low.

Thanks. Sloppy work.

I’m half an Australia away from my usual internet-rant tooling, and I find multi-tab cross referencing on mobile pretty unenjoyable.

All I'm saying is: if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, the drive to the airport wasn't more dangerous than your flight on the plane.

This is intuitive and obvious and yet is somehow beaten out of us by "quick facts" that we accept blindly touting commercial aviation as some kind of miracle. It's still a miracle but not quite to the degree that people believe. Hurtling through the sky at 0.8 Mach in a metal tube will always be more dangerous than rolling down a highway in a metal cage at 70 mph.

None of the people who responded to me yet have refuted this.

From https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/

> In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was .003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on US highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles.

Planes travel about 10x-20x faster than cars, but that’s still 0.06 vs 0.57. Seems like quite a difference. Which numbers are you using?

Is the purpose of travel to go from one place to another or to spend time?

If it’s to go from one place to another, referencing statistics to per-mile seems to make more sense and, to me, it’s in no way “cheating because planes travel so fast”.

But your choice of destination changes because air travel is available to you. You wouldn't go to a destination thousands of miles away, as often, if it weren't possible to fly there.

It's always hilarious to see ignorant developers on HN claiming that real world engineering problems are easy to solve based on zero actual knowledge or experience. This kind of comment is really peak HN.

An autopilot for airplanes is only "easy" until something goes wrong. For example, one failure mode for autopilots is that if the aircraft gets progressively more and more out of trim the autopilot will automatically compensate until it hits its design limit. Then it suddenly disengages, leaving the human pilots in manual control of a nearly uncontrollable aircraft. If you talk to an actual flight control engineer they can give you plenty more examples of why building a safe autopilot is quite hard.

And yet it was done decades ago. Air traffic control is just as solvable.

"Done" in what sense? Do you even understand how autopilots work and how limited they are?

So why did we have airplane autopilots decades before car autopilots if it's not easier?

"Easier" != "easy"

Airplane autopilots are basically just cruise control.

You still have a human in the loop double checking everything constantly and stepping in as soon as something isn’t routine (which is actually quite frequently).

This is such a strange comment section.

Airplane autopilot is more like the cruise control feature in your car, not a self-driving computer that does everything for the pilots while they sit back.

Car autopilot and airplane autopilot don't share much in common other than the word "autopilot"

Modern auto pilot and flight management computer combos can fly way-points and perform full Cat III auto lands.

I’m not suggesting the pilots are sitting there doing fuck-all, or that they are not necessarily.

I think what the automate ATC advocates are suggesting is to bring ATC in to the 21st century.

Yes, and that's what the FAA NextGen program has been doing incrementally since 2003. There are probably ways to accelerate it but it seems like most of the "automate ATC advocates" are simply ignorant and haven't done their homework.

https://www.faa.gov/nextgen

Thanks for that link too. I wasn’t aware of the extent to which all those is already underway.

My knowledge is mostly limited to a casual watching of the aviation YouTube boffins.

That’s a nice strawman you’re creating there.

An aircraft has fewer and simpler variables to deal with than ground vehicle.

If a ground vehicle runs a red light, it’s potentially fatal error. There are more of these for a car than there are for an airplane.

You don’t have to write automation to avoid hitting trees in a plane. An airplane just needs terrain data and a few algorithms.

There are a few enough airplanes and airplane manufacturers that you could regulate a specific algorithm for traffic avoidance.

That's a nice strawman you're creating there. In some airspace classes and flight regimes an aircraft has more variables, especially when you account for possible failures. If an aircraft has a mechanical failure it can't just pull over and stop.

There are about 46000 aircraft registered in the USA, plus more that sometimes fly in from foreign countries. Many aircraft were manufactured decades ago by companies that no longer exist so major upgrades aren't economically practical.

> There are more of these for a car than there are for an airplane.

Half of this comment section has strangely simplified ideas of how airplanes work and how a flight might get into trouble.

It's crazy that so many comments are convinced that completely automating airplane flight is some relatively trivial problem.

Those comments are coming from people whose aviation "knowledge" was learned by playing Ace Combat on Xbox and watching Snakes on a Plane. Totally disconnected from reality.

Speak for yourself. I ride in Waymos frequently.

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