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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. If it ain't broken don't fix it.

It's not broken in the "regularly kills people" sense, which is good. It is broken in the "inefficient and capacity limited" sense, which means flights cost more, have fewer departures when demand is highest, and we are still stuck with human air traffic controllers doing the most stressful aspects of the job, causing high turnover and, when they walk out on strike, airport shutdowns.

And what's exactly wrong with that???

All that means that it's crystal clear to Upper-Management that air traffic control is Hard!, and it must be properly resourced. It makes me feel safer (even if probably more risky due to human error).

The minute automation comes in, an army of Crazy! PMs will begin to demand that everything has to be done due Thursday evening, so QA can test over the weekend, and then the Bean-Counters come in and slash every specification of hardware because its not quote-Efficient!-unquote.

Would you really want to fly in a world like that????

Also, the original article mentions a contractor who committed suicide by taking down the Chicago ATC system. Isn't suicide a leading cause of death in air traffic controllers as well? Perhaps the systems aren't working so great now given the real human cost.

I would argue it is broken. >It can handle a limited amount of traffic, and controllers can't see anything outside of their own airspace—when they hand off a plane to a contiguous airspace, it vanishes from their radar.

To me there's no way to tell if the plane flies out of their space or drops out of the sky at that moment. If that's the case the search and rescue won't be better had MH370 happened in the US.

Even with this new system MH370 could happen to an aircraft leaving the US. Both the pacific and atlantic oceans have giant radar black spots where aircraft aren't trackable and instead they rely on HF to guestimate where aircraft are [0].

[0] http://www.technologyreview.com/news/533871/could-passenger-...

>To me there's no way to tell if the plane flies out of their space or drops out of the sky at that moment.

The problem there is primary radar coverage, not the ATC system. (MH370 turned off its transponder so the only way to detect it was via primary radar.) There's no point in spending huge amounts of money expanding primary radar coverage just to get a marginal benefit in an enormously unlikely scenario.

Who gets to define broke? How about the tax dollars paying for legacy equipment, legacy labor, etc? How about the lack of an uprade path and current limitations being permanent?

I inherited a system from a guy with this mentality. I had a rack of 12 year old Solaris boxes in production running software almost as old. It was a complete nightmare. Part of things not being "broke" is making sure they work well into the future as well. You're just building up a massive technical debt with a "aint broke" mentality.

Something like air traffic control has a much, much higher potential cost for software bugs than most applications do and, unfortunately, that also means a much slower upgrade cycle.

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