If you were to design an entire ATC system from scratch (pilot interfaces, sensors everywhere in the airport and planes etc) it can be automated. But with pilots having to actually talk to ATC (and sometimes talk over each other with no feedback) instead of observing their status on a screen and pressing buttons on what they want to do or change their status it seems like it will be quite hopeless for quite some time.
What you can probably do is create software which observes traffic and simulates it into the future and notifies the human ATCs about risks. It might even be a good idea to try and digitize it for the ATCs so they talk less and press buttons more (which will feed into the simulation) and use TTS for the legacy transmissions to pilots that don't have an updated interface. Given the regulation on that industry it seems unlikely anyone competent enough to do it will have an interest to even try.
> If you were to design an entire ATC system from scratch (pilot interfaces, sensors everywhere in the airport and planes etc) it can be automated.
Even then you'll probably run into the long-tail distribution issues, similar to self-driving cars. 99.9% of all situations are pretty standard, but once in a while something so abstruse happens that it's not pre-programmed and requires some creativity to solve.
> What you can probably do is create software which observes traffic and simulates it into the future and notifies the human ATCs about risks.
Fully agree. Some of the recent close calls really were "obvious" much earlier, meaning they were not caused by late course changes.
Have we just forgotten that there is more to computing than LLMs?
Most big planes can land themselves now - in calm weather, at least. It's done regularly when fog is worse than a certain point, because the necessary radio signals pass through the fog. Both the airport and the plane need certain equipment. The same navigation equipment is used on many manual approaches, but with a human in the loop.
> hallucinate 10% of the time in charge of human lives
Out of curiosity, about a year ago I queried a few models about how to fly a particular instrument approach. It was an ILS approach using a DME arc transition. Other the basic concept of lateral and vertical guidance, most of the models got literally everything wrong. Wrong headings, wrong NAVAID frequencies. Wrong procedures. Maybe they’re better now in this domain, but they were confident in their claims of the ability to read an approach plate. But it was terrible.
What you can probably do is create software which observes traffic and simulates it into the future and notifies the human ATCs about risks. It might even be a good idea to try and digitize it for the ATCs so they talk less and press buttons more (which will feed into the simulation) and use TTS for the legacy transmissions to pilots that don't have an updated interface. Given the regulation on that industry it seems unlikely anyone competent enough to do it will have an interest to even try.