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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

#41

Post by mh- »

dharmab wrote: post #18

I'm the developer of a speech-to-speech tool for tactical radar control for a combat flight simulator ( https://github.com/dharmab/skyeye ). My users have often asked to expand it to ATC as well, usually under the impression that it could be done trivially with ChatGPT. I love that I can now link to your post to explain how difficult this problem is! :)

Being unfamiliar with DCS' architecture, I expected this repo to be in Lua or something. I was surprised to find a very polished, neatly structured, well-documented Go service, haha. Very cool!

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

#42

Post by TylerE »

kristian1109 wrote: post #39
TylerE wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding is that TCAS is disabled not due to radar limitations, but because it isn't altitude-aware and will happily generate an avoidance command that results in CFIT.

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

#43

Post by btown »

kristian1109 wrote: post #22
ryandrake wrote: post #21

> The latest system transcribes the VHF control audio at about ~1.1% WER (Word Error Rate), down from a previous record of ~9%. I'd be curious about what happens when the ASR fails. This is not the place to guess or AI-hallucinate. As a pilot, I can always ask "Say Again" over the radio if I didn't understand. ASR can't do that. Also, it would be pretty annoying if my readback was correct, but the system misunderstoo…

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…

One of the challenges I imagine you'll face as you move towards active advisory is that the more an alerting tool is relied upon, the more an absence of a flag from it is considered a positive signal that things are fine. "I didn't hear from Enhanced Radar, so we don't need to worry about ___" is a situation where a hallucinated silence of the alerting tool could contribute to danger, even if it's billed as an "extra" safety net.

I imagine that aviation regulatory bodies have high standards for this - a tool being fully additive to existing tools does not necessarily mean that it's cleared for use in a cockpit or in an ATC tower, right? Do you have thoughts about how you'll approach this? Also curious from a broader perspective - how do you sell any alerting tool into a niche that's highly conscious of distractions, and of not just false positive alerts but false negatives as well?

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

#44

Post by kristian1109 »

RachelF wrote: post #40

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…

1. Our first product is post-op review at airports. We're selling that to airport managers who use our system for training and incident review. Today, when a ground ops vehicle (for example) makes a mistake, the airport manager has to note the incident, call the tower, wait a week for them to burn a CD of the audio, scrub through to find the relevant comms, go to a separate source to pull the ADS-B track (if available), fuse all that together, and review with the offending employee. Our product just delivers all that data at their fingertips. For training, we also flag clips where the phraseology isn't quite right, etc. Obviously this isn't the long term product, but it gets us to revenue quickly and side-steps regulation for now.

2. Agree

[edit] (oops, sorry, seeing your edit)

2. The regulation allows for escalating assurance levels. We'll start with low assurance (advisory) and climb that ladder. We're definitely not naive about it; this will be hard and annoying. But it's inconceivable that someone won't do this in the next 10 years. Too important.

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

#45

Post by kristian1109 »

btown wrote: post #43
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…

One of the challenges I imagine you'll face as you move towards active advisory is that the more an alerting tool is relied upon, the more an absence of a flag from it is considered a positive signal that things are fine. "I didn't hear from Enhanced Radar, so we don't need to worry about ___" is a situation where a hallucinated silence of the alerting tool could contribute to danger, even if it's billed as an "extra…

Yes, fair points. In talking to controllers, this has already come up. There are a few systems that do advisory alerting and controllers have expressed some frustration because each alert triggers a bunch of paperwork and they are not 100% relevant.

There are lots of small steps on this ladder.

The first is post-operational. You trigger an alert async and someone reviews it after the fact. Tools like this help bring awareness to hot spots or patterns of error that can be applied later in real time by the human controller.

A step up from that is real-time alerting, but not to the main station controller. There's always a manager in the tower that's looking over everyone's shoulder and triaging anything that comes up. That person is not as focused on any single area as the main controllers. There's precedence for tools surfacing alerts to the manager, and then they decide whether it's worth stepping in. This will probably be where our product sits for a while.

The bar to get in front of an active station controller is extremely high. But it's also not necessary for a safety net product like this to be helpful in real time.

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

#46

Post by kristian1109 »

TylerE wrote: post #42
kristian1109 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding is that TCAS is disabled not due to radar limitations, but because it isn't altitude-aware and will happily generate an avoidance command that results in CFIT.

The systems I've flown have definitely been altitude aware. They won't alert if the plane is sufficiently deconflicted above or below.

One problem for sure is that when you're close to the ground you have to be careful about buildings, cell towers, etc. Terrain is one thing, but when you're a few hundred feet AGL, you could quickly be in the way of tall structures if a TCAS alert goes off.

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

#47

Post by lxe »

I was thinking along the same exact lines:

Why do we still rely on analog narrowband AM voice over VHF to do vital comms like air traffic control? Same way as we did in the 1940s!

We should be transcribing the messages and relaying them digitally with signatures and receipt acknowledgement.

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

#48

Post by RockyMcNuts »

Maybe the future is structured electronic messaging with the humans in the loop.

Like, check in with the controller but most messages are sent electronically and acknowledged manually.

I have your clearance, advise when ready to copy, then you write everything down on kneeboard with a pencil and then manually put it in the navigation system, is a little archaic.

certainly speech to text is a useful transition but in the long run the controller could click on an aircraft and issue the next clearance with a keyboard shortcut. then the pilot would get a visual and auditory alert in the cockpit and click to acknowledge.

I would hope someone at NASA or DARPA or somewhere is working on it. And then of course the system can detect conflicts, an aircraft not following the clearance etc.

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

#49

Post by jimnotgym »

lxe wrote: post #47

I was thinking along the same exact lines: Why do we still rely on analog narrowband AM voice over VHF to do vital comms like air traffic control? Same way as we did in the 1940s! We should be transcribing the messages and relaying them digitally with signatures and receipt acknowledgement.

Isn't it because AM audio is still understandable under very suboptimal conditions where digital might not get through? Digital narrowband data modes tend to pass very small amounts of data

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

#50

Post by nitin_j11 »

Your system fuses ATC speech recognition, NLP, and ADS-B signals to detect and mitigate human error in air traffic control. Given the rapid advancements in multimodal AI, have you explored integrating visual data sources (e.g., satellite imagery, radar feeds, or airport surveillance cameras) to further improve situational awareness and error detection? What challenges do you foresee in making Yeager more contextually aware using additional modalities?
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