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Launch HN: Enhanced Radar (YC W25) – A safety net for air traffic control

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Re: Launch HN: Enhanced Radar (YC W25) – A safety net for air traffic control

#31

Post by ryandrake »

kristian1109 wrote: post #30
ryandrake wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for that. It must be exciting to be applying software skills to aviation. Life goals! To me, speech to text and back seems like an incremental solution, but the holy grail would be the ability to symbolically encode the meaning of the words and translate to and from that meaning. People' phraseology varies wildly (even though it often shouldn't). For example, if I'm requesting VFR flight following, I can do it…

Who gave you our event schema!? ;) Kidding aside, yes, you're exactly right. We're already doing this to a large degree and getting better. Lots of our own data labeling and model training to make this good.

Best of luck to you. Finally a Launch HN that's important, potentially life-saving work.

Re: Launch HN: Enhanced Radar (YC W25) – A safety net for air traffic control

#32

Post by Animats »

> To do this, we’ve developed Yeager, an ensemble of models including state of the art speech-to-text that can understand ATC audio.

Listening on multiple channels might help at busier airports. Ground, ramp, approach, departure, and enroute are all on different channels. Military aircraft have their own system. (That may have contributed to the DCA accident.)

Something like this was proposed in the late 1940s. The FAA was trying to figure out how to do air traffic control, and put out a request for proposals. General Railroad Signal responded.[1] They proposed to adapt railroad block signalling to the sky. Their scheme involved people listening to ATC communications and setting information about plane locations into an interlocking machine. The listeners were not the controllers; they just did data entry. The controllers then had a big board with lights showing which blocks of airspace were occupied, and could then give permission to aircraft to enter another block.

Then came radar for ATC, which was a much better idea.

[1] https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/1308783

Re: Launch HN: Enhanced Radar (YC W25) – A safety net for air traffic control

#33

Post by kristian1109 »

qdotme wrote: post #28

I'm loving it. As a private pilot working (slowly) towards my CFI rating - this is also such an opportunity to integrate it into training devices. Bulk of the instrument flight training is "mindgames" anyways - you see nothing other than instruments, your "seat in the pants" is likely to cheat you.. Possibly going a step further, the state of teaching aids available to CFIs is pretty sad, with online quizzes and pre-…

I have a bit of an ax to grind with the state of pilot training tools. There's some interesting new work being done here, but agreed lots to do in this realm. What does a compelling "automatic CFI" look like to you?

Re: Launch HN: Enhanced Radar (YC W25) – A safety net for air traffic control

#34

Post by TylerE »

mclau156 wrote: post #14

Why the focus on speech-to-text and not purely on radar and predicting 3D movement or at least shutting down in 3D space a runway that is occupied?

One major issue is that radar doesn’t work very well at low altitudes. The lower you aim the beam, the more ground clutter you pick up (trees, buildings, clouds, etc).

Re: Launch HN: Enhanced Radar (YC W25) – A safety net for air traffic control

#35

Post by kristian1109 »

Animats wrote: post #32

> To do this, we’ve developed Yeager, an ensemble of models including state of the art speech-to-text that can understand ATC audio. Listening on multiple channels might help at busier airports. Ground, ramp, approach, departure, and enroute are all on different channels. Military aircraft have their own system. (That may have contributed to the DCA accident.) Something like this was proposed in the late 1940s. The F…

It's been interesting to see that a product as simple as combining data from multiple frequencies at once has been really compelling to folks. Can't tell you the number of times we've heard "wait, can you compile ground, tower, and approach in one place?"... "... yes, of course."

Military aircraft are typically equipped with UHF radios (in addition to civilian VHF). Many of the same systems apply, just a different RF band. And we're in the process of adding UHF capabilities to our product as a lot of these military aircraft land at civilian airports for training exercises.

I can't imagine what would've happened if we adopted block signaling for ATC ...

Re: Launch HN: Enhanced Radar (YC W25) – A safety net for air traffic control

#36

Post by fartfeatures »

threeseed wrote: post #24
kristian1109 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good and fair questions. In the very short term, we're deploying this tech more in a post-operation/training role. Imagine being a student pilot, getting in from your solo cross country, and pulling up the debrief will all your comms laid out and transcribed. In this setting, it's helpful for the student to have immediate feedback such as "your readback here missed this detail...", etc. Controllers also have phraseol…

> Looking out 5-10 years, it's conceivable that the error rates on a lot of these systems will be super-human (non-zero, but better than a human). It's also conceivable that you could actually respond "Say Again" to a speech-to-speech model that can correct and repeat any mistakes as they're happening. This is effectively AGI. And I've not seen anyone reputable suggest that our current LLM track will get us to that p…

It isn't AGI, it is domain specific intelligence.

Re: Launch HN: Enhanced Radar (YC W25) – A safety net for air traffic control

#37

Post by kristian1109 »

ryandrake wrote: post #31
kristian1109 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who gave you our event schema!? ;) Kidding aside, yes, you're exactly right. We're already doing this to a large degree and getting better. Lots of our own data labeling and model training to make this good.

Best of luck to you. Finally a Launch HN that's important, potentially life-saving work.

Thanks! Appreciate your inputs here.

Re: Launch HN: Enhanced Radar (YC W25) – A safety net for air traffic control

#38

Post by subhro »

qdotme wrote: post #28

I'm loving it. As a private pilot working (slowly) towards my CFI rating - this is also such an opportunity to integrate it into training devices. Bulk of the instrument flight training is "mindgames" anyways - you see nothing other than instruments, your "seat in the pants" is likely to cheat you.. Possibly going a step further, the state of teaching aids available to CFIs is pretty sad, with online quizzes and pre-…

> Bulk of the instrument flight training is "mindgames" anyways - you see nothing other than instruments, your "seat in the pants" is likely to cheat you..

Eh, I guess I can flex a little. Living in the Pacific North West, I do not have to play mind games. I can almost get IMC delivered on demand. :P

Re: Launch HN: Enhanced Radar (YC W25) – A safety net for air traffic control

#39

Post by kristian1109 »

TylerE wrote: post #34
mclau156 wrote: post #14

Why the focus on speech-to-text and not purely on radar and predicting 3D movement or at least shutting down in 3D space a runway that is occupied?

One major issue is that radar doesn’t work very well at low altitudes. The lower you aim the beam, the more ground clutter you pick up (trees, buildings, clouds, etc).

Yes, this is a challenging issue in ATC. Also, some safety systems are turned off or diminished at critical phases of flight (near the ground) because of the noise problem (TCAS, for example).

ADS-B helps with this as it's self-reporting. And systems like ASDE-X are useful to track objects once they hit the ground. But low-altitude deconfliction is a big problem.

Re: Launch HN: Enhanced Radar (YC W25) – A safety net for air traffic control

#40

Post by RachelF »

I have two questions:

1. Good overview of the technologies you are using, but what product are you planning on building or have built? I understand what you are doing and it's "extra safety over existing systems" but how does it work for the end user? Is the end user an ATC or a pilot?

2. You will find that introducing new systems into this very conservative field is hard. I've built avionics and ATC electronics. The problem isn't normally technology, it's the paperwork. How do you plan on handling this?

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