Completely different things. Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead. Comparing their risk is a complete apples and oranges situation.
Than again, ATC needs to deal with people talking on the radio, so the current system has a really long way to go to be completely automated.
> Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead.
It's funny to read all of these confident comments claiming ATC is easily automated from people who obviously don't understand what ATC entails.
ATC isn't just planning and scheduling. There is a lot of quick thinking and communication with pilots. You might only be thinking of the everything-goes-perfectly-right case, but the real value of having trained ATC operators is handling all of the edge cases and making quick decisions under high pressure scenarios that may not have even been represented in the training set.
ATC is also partially a visual job. Did you ever notice that there's literally a tower at the airport for air traffic control people? The people in this tower will manage things like traffic on the ground and immediate airspace around the tower. Visual inputs and critical thinking skills are very necessary.
There are a lot of assumptions that people outside of aviation make - it reminds me of that “falsehoods programmers believe about dates and time” article that gets passed around from time to time. Off the top of my head, some easily believable falsehoods:
1. The system knows where every plane is going
2. Every plane is talking to ATC
3. Every plane that is currently taking to ATC will be reachable a minute from now
4. If you issue a plane an instruction, it will follow it
5. The planes want to go the most direct route to the destination (winds aloft can often mean direct is slower and more expensive than a more circuitous route)
6. If a plane has an emergency, they will declare an emergency.
7. Planes that are not currently talking to ATC will not fly into the regions where they are supposed to be talking to ATC
8. Planes that are not talking to ATC will not just show up and land at the airport. This happens for a variety of reasons.
9. All planes have working transponders
10. All planes are traveling from one airport and landing (once) at another.
It feels like a tractable problem from the outside, but the variety of issues ATC solves every day is staggering.
11. Planes have radios that can select all ten digits.
Someone's radio broke where they couldn't enter '2' into it, so we had to find frequencies along their path that they could use and where ATC could relay.
You are thinking about automating the existing system, but the current system is entirely defined by the constraint that it must be operated by humans on radios. When this constraint can be removed so are its specific edge cases. When your phone communicates with the cell tower a frequency also must be assigned, and no buttons have to be pressed to do it.
Opposing Bases a few weeks ago had feedback from someone who had a button on their transponder that didn’t work and needed a code without any 5’s in it. Good luck getting _that_ through to auto-ATC.
Can emit all bytes except for 00000101 isn't really the type of problem you see in a digital system. And even if it were, it's pretty simple.
plane 1 > assign code 4563
plane 2 > reject
plane 1 > assign code 0827
plane 2 > accept
Also assigning short codes like that isn't something likely to be necessary in an automated protocol like this. Why not just have every message sent between 2 planes include a sender_id: UUID header?
Worth noting in your “if the system was automated”: There are aircraft permanently without electrical systems. There are aircraft temporarily without electrical systems.
This is no different than the current ATC system. A plane or tower can lose power too. It's not particularly hard for the software to detect a plane that isn't in communication with the rest of the swarm / not obeying commands, assign it highest priority and GTFO of its way. The key is to have the software running on all planes (which you can do with commercial aviation) rather than rely on a centralized system with a single point of failure.
> read all of these confident comments claiming ATC is easily automated
You responded to the wrong comment then. I did not say in any place it would be easy. Just that they're very different class of problems. Nether did I say it's only planning and scheduling. Even the vision part is very different than cars. (Static in known environment vs dynamic in entirely random one)
You're arguing against others or a straw man here.
Also remember that ATC is vital for emergency situations. "Your distress call is important to us, please continue screaming into the void and hopefully a miracle happens.
Should've phrased it way better, that's true. It's a very different kind of vision when you do environment mapping and distance measuring -vs- when you do object tracking from a static location. Yes you need vision processing, but at a much higher resolution (sky is huge, planes are small) and much lower complexity. (moving objects between frames are easier to track) My point is that it's not comparable to what the cars use as vision.
It's always hilarious to see ignorant developers on HN claiming that real world engineering problems are easy to solve based on zero actual knowledge or experience. This kind of comment is really peak HN.
An autopilot for airplanes is only "easy" until something goes wrong. For example, one failure mode for autopilots is that if the aircraft gets progressively more and more out of trim the autopilot will automatically compensate until it hits its design limit. Then it suddenly disengages, leaving the human pilots in manual control of a nearly uncontrollable aircraft. If you talk to an actual flight control engineer they can give you plenty more examples of why building a safe autopilot is quite hard.
Those comments are coming from people whose aviation "knowledge" was learned by playing Ace Combat on Xbox and watching Snakes on a Plane. Totally disconnected from reality.
That's a nice strawman you're creating there. In some airspace classes and flight regimes an aircraft has more variables, especially when you account for possible failures. If an aircraft has a mechanical failure it can't just pull over and stop.
There are about 46000 aircraft registered in the USA, plus more that sometimes fly in from foreign countries. Many aircraft were manufactured decades ago by companies that no longer exist so major upgrades aren't economically practical.
Airplane autopilot is more like the cruise control feature in your car, not a self-driving computer that does everything for the pilots while they sit back.
Car autopilot and airplane autopilot don't share much in common other than the word "autopilot"
Yes, and that's what the FAA NextGen program has been doing incrementally since 2003. There are probably ways to accelerate it but it seems like most of the "automate ATC advocates" are simply ignorant and haven't done their homework.
Airplane autopilots are basically just cruise control.
You still have a human in the loop double checking everything constantly and stepping in as soon as something isn’t routine (which is actually quite frequently).
On a side note, I will use this thread to air out my biggest pet peeve - air travel isn't in fact safer than car travel. Well, it is, per mile, but that's cheating because planes travel so fast. Obviously a 3 hour commercial flight is safer than 40 hours of driving. But cars are still safer per journey.
So, if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, your car ride wasn't actually more dangerous than your flight as the saying goes. The only road-based transportion more dangerous than a plane is the bicycle.
Commercial air travel has a passenger fatality on something like one in ten million flights [0], and less than that on newer aircraft.
Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. [1]
So maybe you are technically correct. Barely. And it has nothing to do with airplanes being fast — planes only need to go a few tens of miles per trip to be significantly safer than cars, and plane trips are a lot longer than that.
All I'm saying is: if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, the drive to the airport wasn't more dangerous than your flight on the plane.
This is intuitive and obvious and yet is somehow beaten out of us by "quick facts" that we accept blindly touting commercial aviation as some kind of miracle. It's still a miracle but not quite to the degree that people believe. Hurtling through the sky at 0.8 Mach in a metal tube will always be more dangerous than rolling down a highway in a metal cage at 70 mph.
None of the people who responded to me yet have refuted this.
> In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was .003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on US highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles.
Planes travel about 10x-20x faster than cars, but that’s still 0.06 vs 0.57. Seems like quite a difference. Which numbers are you using?
Is the purpose of travel to go from one place to another or to spend time?
If it’s to go from one place to another, referencing statistics to per-mile seems to make more sense and, to me, it’s in no way “cheating because planes travel so fast”.
But your choice of destination changes because air travel is available to you. You wouldn't go to a destination thousands of miles away, as often, if it weren't possible to fly there.
Than again, ATC needs to deal with people talking on the radio, so the current system has a really long way to go to be completely automated.