The FAA's plan to fix air traffic? $875M worth of AI
techcrunch.com
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You want to get your approach clearance or weather report? Just call up the ATC on busy line with bunch of people talking fast and over each other.
One can easily imagine a system that broadcasts the weather and clearance, and even aircraft location data close to real-time, and provide great situational awareness to everyone involved.
I don't think it's acceptable to put tens of thousands of people within a crowded airspace and not do everything in our power to keep things organized and secure.
You're always going to be limited to a limited range of capabilities. You can't run a full web browser in every cockpit - you need a standardized interface that works across different vendors, across borders, and over a low-bandwidth radio link.
And I don't think anybody considers CPDLC a failure. The goal was never to 100% replace voice communication.
> One can easily imagine a system that broadcasts the weather
That exists, it's called FIS-B. Everyone uses it.
> and clearance
Clearance isn't something that can just be broadcast. You need to have a conversation with the pilot to make sure the clearance is acceptable to them. The pilot needs the ability to reject the clearance and request amendments.
> even aircraft location data close to real-time, and provide great situational awareness to everyone involved.
This exists, it's called ADS-B. Everyone uses it.
The critically important aspect: approach clearances and weather reports for a specific aircraft are still useful and relevant to all nearby aircraft. Narrow-casting them to specific aircraft reduces situational awareness for all other nearby aircraft. The system is also tolerant of noise: digital communications can be lost entirely with some degradation in signal, analog voice communications can still be interpreted with a fair bit of noise present (see video below).
The subtle aspect: multi-tasking by using more than one human sense - looking and hearing. People dealing with risky or dangerous situations absolutely should not be sucked into a screen for more than a minute or two to get critical information. This includes to more than one pilot where tasks are being managed and delegated. Most (if not all) controlled or 'aviator-coordinated' (CTAF) airports have a specific radio frequency to tune into to get weather information from an automated weather-to-voice system (e.g. https://youtu.be/HHbrlUPP-4k?t=339).
Whilst it sounds clunky, aeronautical phraseology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronautical_phraseology) keeps communications detailed but brief and concise.
Digital voice communications often completely degrade for several seconds with a few lost packets, combined with the brevity of aeronautical phrasing can mean critical information is missed. All of these 'old' systems add up to the cumulative safety (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model) and doctrine built by the aviation industry over many, many decades though sadly because a lot of them were written in the blood of others who perished.
The weather information can easily be transmitted every minute and it can be nicely visualized in the cockpit instead of being crammed into cryptic abbreviations and ancient codes.
Similarly, we are aware of the precise aircraft location and it's intended course, I'm talking about commercial airlines here, so we already know where they're going and what the approach path will be etc.
I find it hard to accept that we're collecting terabytes of telemetry from engines and all the other equipment on the aircraft, but we expect to communicate the weather and traffic information in verbal ways.
There are so many good ways we can solve the underlying requirements, but I think it's all stuck on the cost of implementation and who's going to be making money from it.
Additionally, there are human factors to consider. One commonly read-out piece of data is the local altimeter setting which ensures that all aircraft under the control of the same facility have a common reference - you generally don't set your altimeter to the area you're in, but rather to the setting of where you're going. Airplanes already automatically receive that data, but selecting the exact setting requires manual intervention for precisely this reason.
Add in the need to allow older airplanes to keep flying, the need to be robust to signal jamming, and the inherent safety issues with packing an airplane full of gas and hundreds of people, and it quickly becomes clear that full automation is inadvisable.
Why do quarterbacks yell out code words to call plays? After all, it’s loud stadium and it’s only a couple structs worth of data!
Weather data can be published every minute and shown live as a full map over the screen, not as random abbreviations of wind and cloud coverage.
And we already know where each aircraft is, and where they took off, and where they're headed. So practically speaking the radio talk can be limited to only the important communication and emergencies, while increasing the situational awareness by at least ten fold.
This already exists via FIS-B.
> not as random abbreviations of wind and cloud coverage
The abbreviations (METARs) are a feature, not a bug. There are numerical legal minimums for weather that determine whether a landing is legal or not. A graphical map doesn't tell you this. The METARs are condensed because they're easy for professional pilots to skim.
(Back in the days of teletypes they also saved bandwidth, but that's just a historical note at this point.)
Regardless, pilots already have access to both textual and graphical weather products in the cockpit.
> And we already know where each aircraft is, and where they took off, and where they're headed. So practically speaking the radio talk can be limited to only the important communication and emergencies, while increasing the situational awareness by at least ten fold.
As a pilot myself, I think you're vastly misunderstanding the nature of ATC communication. 90% of communication on the radio are time-sensitve, important things - mostly heading and altitude changes to avoid other traffic.
Weather and clearances (when not relayed by ACARS, FIS-B, or CPDLC) are routinely handled on dedicated frequencies and aren't really causing meaningful frequency congestion.
What happens when the cloud services experience an issue?
This seems like a bad idea in general.
The current admin is probably not helping much, but it's an issue that goes back quite a bit.