| ▲ | proteal a day ago |
| It has to do with how ATC needs to be able to communicate with all planes in the air, even ones built 100 years ago. They have to use radio so everyone can hear everyone else. There’s no other technology that is as ubiquitous as radio, so they have to work with what they’ve got. Upgrading to other stuff would be an absolute nightmare, though they are making progress on less critical fronts. |
|
| ▲ | mmooss a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
|
| ▲ | gosub100 a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
| |
| ▲ | db48x a day ago | parent | next [-] | | That would be slower and ironically less precise than what we already have, which is navigation by named waypoints. | | |
| ▲ | gosub100 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | and in this case, the pilot loaded the wrong waypoint (likely from another runway) and flew toward it. It's not slower, either. have you ever entered a waypoint into a flight computer? they aren't exactly built for speed. | | |
| ▲ | IshKebab 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | So this would have helped because the plane would have automatically loaded the correct route. | | |
| ▲ | db48x 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Making the traffic controller load a flight plan into the plane’s computer merely changes who will make the mistake. If you want to suggest changes, suggest something that actually has a chance of reducing the rate of errors. Besides, pilots don’t just blindly follow the waypoints on their computer. The pilots would have spent half an hour before they even got in the airplane reviewing the plan for the flight. This includes reviewing the published departure information for the airport. In that briefing they would have specifically noted that the direction they will turn after takeoff depends on which runway the tower tells them to take off from. They cannot necessarily guess which runway that’ll be in advance. |
|
|
| |
| ▲ | bigbuppo a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | They already have something better than that. It's called a published departure procedure that pilots are supposed to follow. In this case, one of the pilots failed to follow the published departure procedure and came close to being on the next season of Mayday: Air Disaster. | | |
|
