As a commercial pilot, your response is a little glib and kind of ignores the meaningful advances that have been made with D-ATIS, ADS-B In, CPDLC, DUATS, XM weather, etc. Voice is absolutely not perfect, analog FM audio often comes through garbled, pilots have to wait their turn on a busy single-user channel for timely information, etc.

This doesn't even begin to touch on the complexities that will come from full integration of drones and eVTOL into the national airspace, which will absolutely swamp a one-speaker-at-a-time analog FM comms system.

You make a strong case for voice, but that doesn’t necessarily invalidate their argument, they never said voice should be replaced.

Here’s some ideas: 1. A data side channel 2. Use it to send originator for each message, have unique note on other end per sender so they don’t need to check visually, but also show on their display so corrupted or suspicious sender can be verified, in desperate circumstances (rather than the current case of “that cannot be done at all”). 3. Digital audio, allowing actual high quality audio, which we know does improve comprehension, which should not be optional in this context. 4. Take some lessons from modern coms systems on how to handle overlapping coms, plus the extra bandwidth from digital, so overlapping coms is handled gracefully (I realise the realtime nature prevents being too clever, but perhaps blocking all but the first to speak and playing a tone if you’re being blocked), perhaps with some sensible overrides like atc and anyone declaring an emergency getting priority. Currently overlap obliterates both messages and it’s possible for senders to not even know their message was lost. This has contributed to accidents, whilst basic direct radio transmissions cannot avoid this, smart algorithms with some networking could definitely reduce the failure cases to very rare and extreme scenarios 5. Let atc interact with flight planners on aircraft, show the aircraft’s actual locally programmed flight plan to atc, with clear icons if it differs from the filed plan atc has, and perhaps as an emergency only measure, allow atc to submit a flight plan to the aircraft (not replacing the active plan of course, just as a suggestion/support for struggling pilots, “since you have not understood my instructions 3 times, please review the submitted plan on your flight computer, note how it differs from what you programmed”) 6. Aircraft usually know where they are, and which atc they’re meant to be communicating with, have the data channels talk even when the audio channel is not set correctly. If incompetent pilots forget to switch channel, you can force an alarm instead of launching a fighter jet, or just have a button for “connect to correct atc” and a red light when you’re not on the correct one.

That’s just the ideas I’ve come up with just now. 4. Is probably quite hard to get right, and 5 could add load, so should be done carefully. But hard to believe the current system is technically optimal, or even vaguely close to optimal.

Admittedly, I know the real reason is that having 1 working system for everyone is better than a theoretically great system that is barely implemented and a complicated mess of handoffs between the 2. But with care they can absolutely improve things, but feels like things are moving a few decades slower than they should be.

> I want you to very carefully consider the better options.

How about digital HD audio at least? In parallel with legacy analog audio.

The next step is visual alerts for pilots if the ATC tries to call _them_. You know, like our phones can do for nearly 150 years.

Edit: I'm studying for a private pilot license, and the difficulties in just understanding what the ATC and the other pilots are talking about is really a major stumbling block for me.

Yup. Audio is sourced from volunteers with home radios & antennas. Quality will be dependant on how far the nearest one was from LAX and their personal setup. Not necessarily representative of quality that the controller/pilot was hearing.

https://www.liveatc.net/

If you want to listen in yourself.

This is one of the highest quality recordings of such traffic that I have heard. They are usually a lot worse.

Keep in mind that the person talking and listening to the radio is not the pilot flying the airplane. Pilot and Copilot alternate which job they are doing. It's not the same as the driver of a car talking on a phone.

CPDLC is text messaging between controllers and pilots. It is widely used amongst most carriers. It does not work for time critical situations. Voice and radio is the only solution that will work when you don't have time to type a message.

Talking to someone on the phone who has a birds eye view of the road, other drivers, and the map, and only addresses you to help you drive? in no way possible reduces your situational awareness. I refuse to believe that.

Now idle chatting with coworker Wendy about dinner will take you out of that situation and make you more dangerous.

Would you rather them read text messages on their iPads?

There seems to be a lack of imagination in a lot of these replies. Everyone is thinking that the only alternative to voice directions only is text messages? You only need to look at satnav to see one obvious alternative.

It’s been required in the US since 2020. But, ADS-B would not have played a factor in this incident.

Couldn't comms broadcast in multiple parallel modes, like cell phone traffic?: More clear (probably digital) transmissions in on band, and for backward compatibility, old radio transmissions in another.

I think one of the best things they could add would be an electronic drawing tablet for ATC to draw a flight path on a map and pipe it directly into the pilots EFIS or HUD. It's not fool-proof, but in high density airspace, it seems more efficient to be able to draw a curve and press a button than try to verbally describe it. Of course one major pitfall is you cannot draw in 3D.

Amazon is up to, what, one and half nines right now?

Unintelligible audio is a failure mode.