Can’t this whole thing being automated and let only special/unexpected situations being handled by humans ?

alistairSH an hour ago | parent | next [-]

This was a special/unexpected situation - one of the other passenger jets declared an emergency and needed to evacuate the passengers onto the ground (there were no free gates to return). The firetruck was on it's way to assist with the emergency.

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pjc50 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nowhere has automated ATC because errors look like this.

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mememememememo an hour ago | parent | next [-]

We automated some of the flight, we automate train signals.

We can probably semi automate runway crossing. Someone mentioned red lights when you definitely cannot cross

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alex43578 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's like the argument about how we'll never (or should never) have self driving cars.

Clearly human-run ATC results in situations like this, so the idea that automated ATC could result in a runway collision and should therefore never be implemented is bad.

	▲	mikepurvis 21 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's not an argument for total automation but an argument for machine augmentation. It would be fascinating just as an experiment to feed the audio of the ATC + flight tracks [1] into a bot and see if it could spot that a collision situation had been created. You obviously wouldn't authorize the bot to do everything, but you could allow it to autonomously call for stops or go-arounds in a situation like this where a matter of a few seconds almost certainly would have made the difference. Imagine the human controller gives the truck clearance to cross and the bot immediately sees the problem and interrupts with "No, Truck 1 stop, no clearance. JZA 646 pull up and go around." If either message gets through then the collision is avoided, and in case of a false positive, it's a 30 second delay for the truck and a few minutes to circle the plane around and give it a new slot. [1]: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWOQ8UhgoQR/
	▲	2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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cj 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	alistairSH 4 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This. Remember when all the Waymos were confused by a power outage? Now do that, but with airplanes that will fall thousands of feet and kill hundreds instead of park in the middle of the street. I'm not saying we shouldn't automate things. We should. But, it's not easy. If it was, we would have done it already.
	▲	tosapple an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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gosub100 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.