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Comment by rekrsiv | Hacker News Reader

I am alarmed at the high number of supposed engineers on this thread that are seemingly unaware of how safety-critical systems work. Literally every other piece of this system has redundancy built into it. Robustness is never optional in a scenario involving human safety.

When did this lunacy become an arguable position?

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This is my field and the amount of extremely confident nonsense I've read on here in the last 24 hours is going to put me in the cardiac ICU.

You're still using outdated bio-hearts? Wouldn't it be better to just use a cronjob on a server-controlled heart?

Actual lol. Thank you. :)

I'm not in aerospce field, but surprised how low-tech and critical to human error takeoff/landing/taxi process is.

We have TCAS/ACAS in air, but no similar automatic safety guards near/on the field?

We do have that on the ground. The truck wasn't participating.

TCAS is much simpler than your proposal. Ensuring that traffic can't get too close to you in midair is a different problem from analyzing complex, non-linear movements at tightly-packed airports. How do you implement this system while avoiding false positives?

Imagine that you're landing at one of two parallel runways. There's a plane lining up on the other runway. You can't have proximity warnings like TCAS, because this is a safe situation even though you get close to the other plane. What if that plane is taxiing towards your runway? You can't predict its movements until it starts entering the runway because it may just stop at the hold short line, as it should. Extrapolate this simple scenario to anything that could ever happen at airports with a large variety of actors, and you'll start to see why everyone in the world is still relying on humans to do this.

The real answer is that the airline industry is huge, and adding more safety measures will cost billions, and it'll dampen the stock market in the short term. Also, because there's ample room for finger-pointing, the decision-makers who could push for better safety are unlikely to be sued. Your local theme park is probably obsessive with maintenance and safety features, because they'll definitely get a lawsuit if someone is injured.

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