The point of the frogs boiling metaphor is the frogs in fact do not survive.

As long as we're desperate for a job and we need to finance our lifestyle to impress the Johnsons.

Not everyone. If you were friends with Epstein you got insider information and a victim to abuse.

Okay, so then what is? Most jobs have this failure mode because there's a tendency to strip funding until disaster happens, even when it was clearly foreseeable.

Well, there was the time Ronald Reagan fired all the ATC workers because they were trying to unionize.

Nowhere has automated ATC because errors look like this.

Imagine it were 90% automated. Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.

You're left with a bunch of planes in the sky that can't stay there forever, and not enough humans on the ground to manually land them.

Now image the outage is also happening at all airports nearby, preventing planes from diverting.

How do you get the planes out of the sky? Not enough humans to do it manually.

Now imagine the system comes back online. Does it know how to handle a crisis scenario where you have dozens of planes overhead, each about to run out of fuel? Hopefully someone thought of that edge case.

There's exceptions all the time. They turn back because a warning light came on. They saw a deer on the runway, a passenger got up to the bathroom. There's no way that could be automatic, plus they often need atc to look at their jet to see if it's damaged.

My suggestion is to restrict the use of smaller jets like crj and turboprops. I know airports like LaGuardia can't handle the big jets either, but they could reduce the slots and require a jet that holds, say, 150 people or more. This would result in fewer flights per day to some airports, but reduce overall congestion while still serving the same number of passengers.

Changing the delivery method doesn't do anything to solve the problem of a controller sending an instruction that creates a hazard.

I’m not saying we couldn’t move more into automation. What I’m saying is that doing so will not solve all of our air/ground control problems. We still have human pilots and humans driving vehicles on the ground. Switching from humans directing landings to machines might improve some things but will not solve for all (and probably not most) risks.

Literally the crash here was caused by a fire truck entering the runway.

I'm pretty sure the amount of data isn't the problem here. Maybe it's the number of corner cases? You would still want some human-in-the loop with quality UI for ATC.

with extremely controlled conditions. There is no fog in database, nor fallible humans involved, What an ignorant response

In a digitized environment. We cannot yet simulate the real world.

True. But to avoid 1 minute unavailability per year requires 99.9999 % availability

Yup, by having backup runways.

>> Software routinely solves database coordination problems with millions of users per second.

A naive view that confuses the map with the territory.

While in a database state you write a row and reality updates atomically....for aircraft they exist in a physical world where your model lives with lag, noise, and lossy sensors, and that world keeps moving whether your software is watching or not. Failed database transactions roll back, a landing clearance issued against stale state does not. The hard problem in ATC is not coordination logic but physical objects with momentum, human agency, and failure modes that do not respect your consistency model.

Literally called it “low hanging fruit”.

One jet landing every minute, coordinating the airspace for miles around the airport, along with coordinating non-landing traffic (helicopters, small craft), while making sure these (already heavily automated) flight systems dont get confused and kill several hundred people sounds easy to you, along with keeping everything on time and schedule?

Go write it then.

I worked in aviation in the late 1990s and automating ATC is all they could talk about. So, that's almost 30 years of talking and no action.

> Every time I've asked what's so hard about automating ATC

Why don’t you describe the hypothetical automation you believe would solve the problems then?

My hunch is that either your ideas are already implemented (like GP post who said they need to add red lights at the runway instances, except yeah, they do have that), or they are just bad.

> indignant sputtering and patronizing hand-waving.

Preemptively insulting everyone who might respond to you certainly looks like you’re asking for a real conversation. :|

Your accusation of “patronizing hand-waving” is especially off base considering you literally proposed nothing except “automating”. Hand waving indeed.

TCAS is fantastic - absolutely stellar example of effective automation.

But calling a replacement of major ATC functions with software a "simple fix" is a perfect illustration of why this is a bad idea. Nothing about human-rated safety-critical software is simple, and coming at it with the attitude that it is? In my view, as an experienced pilot, flight instructor, spacecraft operator, and software engineer, that thinking is utterly disqualifying.

Besides, there already are a lot of "simple" fixes in place for this problem, e.g. RWSL, which didn't prevent this accident.

Airport emergency services are presumably trained in this, but since a plane cannot stop easily (or not at all on takeoff after V1), I seem to remember the general rule is that even emergency vehicles with lights and sirens on give way to planes, and don't enter runways without permission from the tower.

In the audio released by the BBC, the fire truck DID get permission from the tower to cross something, I can't tell if it was the runway in question. However, to cross the red runway lights if lit, you normally need that spelled out too something like "truck one, cross four delta, cross red lights". This did not happen on the BBC audio, which could mean one of many things.

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The problem is knowing before today how to handle the case where a ground vehicle isn't across the runway in those 30 seconds.

The FAA NextGen program has been running for literally decades. They have made some progress but there's a lot of work left to be done.

https://www.faa.gov/nextgen

Of course it matters. All of these entities have limited budgets and personnel and almost unlimited ways they could apply those resources. They have to choose what to chase and they do that by deciding how big of a problem it is.

Voice communication can still be used for anything out of the ordinary despite automating the common case.

Almost all voice transmissions are routine instructions/clearances from ground to air, with the pilots reading them back to reduce the chance of errors. In fact, this already exists and is in wide use in (at least) the US, EU, and in transoceanic airspace.

Of course, now you have two systems that can fail, and reducing reliance on the older one can easily cause automation complacency (which is a well-researched source of errors) and require more frequent refresher courses if the skill is not practiced on a continuos basis.

I suspect that that these are the reasons it's not commonly used for approach and tower operations: There's a lot more spontaneous and/or nonstandard stuff happening in those flight phases, and as you say you don't want a pilot's eyes on a tiny screen/keyboard instead of on their instruments or out the window.