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America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

cnn.com

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Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#151

Post by bilbo0s »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #107
robert_foss wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reagan taking away collective bargaining rights for ATCs seems to be what have led to the shortage and the helicopter accident last week.

The official investigation report is of course going to take a bit, but the ATC audio is public, and the helicopter was warned twice about the plane, and said they had a visual of the plane. Besides never missing an opportunity to 'slam' the opposition, I have no idea why this is being construed as an ATC failure.

Well, I mean, if we can blame DEI?

That's part of the problem here, everyone is just taking political potshots. Which is to be expected. But the danger is you lose sight of the real issue. As you mentioned, the helo pilot's loss of situational awareness. (Did they ever even have situational awareness?)

We can't be getting into these situations where every crisis is met by this typical American emotional reactionism. We can't be blaming the "left", or the "right", or the most ridiculous one which was "it was the black guys somehow". We gotta stop letting that crap distract us.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#152

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

ArlenBales wrote: post #14

I fear this will lead to Trump pushing OpenAI to use AI for air traffic controllers, which is going to result in a lot of deaths. Could AI eventually do the job? Maybe, but it will be a bloody road to get there.

If you mean the current fad for LLMs, then yeah it's absolutely the wrong tools for the job.

But "planning what best goes where when" could very much be algorithmic, yes. AI in the sense that A* path finding, and Kuhn's Hungarian algorithm for optimisation are "AI".

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#153

Post by parliament32 »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #103
trunnell wrote: post #20

To those who know more about ATC: is there any hope of automation?

I don't know more about ATC, but it looks like a field ripe for disruption and innovation. AI should be able to handle the coordination of flights without the downside of the delays and limitations of the human training pipeline, worker fatigue, and stress - all for less expense. The more I think about it, the more I feel like I could have something tangible at the end of a weekend or two - at least a prototype.

I would not want a text generator to "handle" anything responsible for human lives.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#154

Post by ketralnis »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #118

We have planes moving hundreds of miles an hour being managed exclusively by audio channels. Does this not blow anyone else's minds? This seems like a clear case of 'because we've always done it that way'. There's no way if a system was being developed today they'd say to hell with screens, lets just give them instructions over audio and assume they'll follow them to a T if acknowledged.

That there is a computer at ATC that a human looks at, reads what it says with their eyes, speaks those instructions over the radio in a specific protocol, another human listens to it (and confirms within that protocol), and inputs those control signals into the airplane.

Computer -> human -> radio(spoken protocol) -> human -> plane.

There aren't a lot of practical reasons it can't just be

Computer -> radio(digital protocol) -> plane

(There are nonzero reasons, such as the presence of weird situations, VFR aircraft, etc., but it's not a lot.)

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#155

Post by kelseyfrog »

unsnap_biceps wrote: post #114
kelseyfrog wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know more about ATC, but it looks like a field ripe for disruption and innovation. AI should be able to handle the coordination of flights without the downside of the delays and limitations of the human training pipeline, worker fatigue, and stress - all for less expense. The more I think about it, the more I feel like I could have something tangible at the end of a weekend or two - at least a prototype.

one that you would trust the lives of thousands of humans to every day? It seems unlikely we are anywhere close to a point where we can ensure that any AI won't hallucinate and cause an issue.

Sure, AI can spit out nonsense, and that’s a real concern. But in engineering, we deal with imperfect tradeoffs every day - it’s baked into the job. If we insist on a flawless solution before shipping anything, we’ll never ship. There’s always an optimum where we uphold safety standards without sacrificing forward progress

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#156

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

bobthepanda wrote: post #130
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #118

We have planes moving hundreds of miles an hour being managed exclusively by audio channels. Does this not blow anyone else's minds? This seems like a clear case of 'because we've always done it that way'. There's no way if a system was being developed today they'd say to hell with screens, lets just give them instructions over audio and assume they'll follow them to a T if acknowledged.

there are already a lot of screens and things to look at in a cockpit. and in emergency situations, screens can fail. audio has the advantage of being highly backwards compatible and extremely reliable, so long as the pilots are alive and conscious (and if they're not, the plane is most likely SOL anyways: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522 )

>and in emergency situations, screens can fail.

Audio makes perfect sense as a backup, but 99.99% of flights would benefit from having a screen showing object and current planned route.

In this particular case, simply having that information available would have allowed an onboard computer to predict a collision.

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#157

Post by CYR1X »

stevenwoo wrote: post #150
runako wrote: post #4

Seems like a colossal error to have asked them all to quit. I wonder -- if half of the air traffic controllers took the offer to leave their jobs, do we have a Plan B? The deadline they have been given to decide is Thursday; I have not seen any communication as to whether ATC (and TSA, etc.) will be operational Friday.

The number that I've heard that accepted that offer across the government is in line with normal attrition rates with federal employees - the only people who bit were already planning on quitting. It appears that most or all else was wise to how shady this deal was.

Part all of this BS is sure at twitter if you pull this you might get a decent attrition rate but isn't the federal government known for people never quitting? If they quit, it's quiet quitting coming in every day and doing nothing. Isn't that generally the purpose behind this too? Like...good luck get a real amount of people to quit they are going to hold on for dear life

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#158

Post by slt2021 »

lenerdenator wrote: post #92
legitster wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, if not police, then teacher's unions: there's not a lot of available studies, but most point to a non-existent or negative relationship between CBAs and student performance. Or in the private sectors, non-unionized manufacturers like Toyota and Honda always outperform legacy manufacturers in the US on quality. I'm not saying there's not a strong argument for unionization, but an improvement in quality is not on…

> Okay, if not police, then teacher's unions: there's not a lot of available studies, but most point to a non-existent or negative relationship between CBAs and student performance. I'm going to guess that there are far stronger correlations with household wealth when it comes to student performance than there are whether the students are taught by teachers who are employed under a CBA. > Or in the private sectors, n…

not true, it is better for the brand long-term to build good cars. but unionized workforce makes it economically unfeasible.

GM makes crappy because, if they tried to make high quality cars, they would be priced like Cadillacs

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#159

Post by [deleted] »

AutistiCoder wrote: post #140
legitster wrote: post #77

Everyone is going to make this about money or unions or etc, but my employer briefly worked with some ATC employee groups and I can tell you exactly why they are short staffed: - The FAA has strict hiring requirements. You have to be mentally and physically capable, and by their own admission less than 10% of applicants are qualified for the job. https://www.faa.gov/air-traffic-controller-qualifications - The trainin…

I've dreamed of having an AI model run ATC. Just train an AI on ATC recordings and other data, maybe throw in some reinforcement learning,and then test it in low-stakes commercial airspace (like a regional airport)

[deleted]

Re: America desperately needs more air traffic controllers

#160

Post by stevenwoo »

robert_foss wrote: post #38
lenerdenator wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if half of the air traffic controllers took the offer to leave their jobs, do we have a Plan B? In theory you could do what Reagan did and tell the military to do ATC. Whether or not this is a good idea is another matter.

Reagan taking away collective bargaining rights for ATCs seems to be what have led to the shortage and the helicopter accident last week.

Congress keeps approving more flights into DCA over the in hindsight, clear objections by those in charge of safety at DCA, the FAA and several congress people in the minority. Congress people use it as their personal transit hub. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/us/reagan-airport-flights...
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