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

FAA actually tried moving to digital voice (has benefits wrt airband congestion) but it didn't go anywhere. I believe a lot came down to the minimal benefit over current solutions, plus the coordination and safety implications of actually making the switch. Tough for an FAA official to pull the trigger on a rollout that has even 0.1% chance of an aircraft crashing.

Great!

I was thinking about this the other day. To me, the future is decreasing the amount of coordination that happens verbally over VHF.

Ignoring takeoff clearances for a moment, my limited understanding is that most traffic in and out of an airport follows a prescribed pattern: You take off, turn to some particular bearing, climb to some particular altitude, contact center on some particular frequency... etc. Listening to VASAviation, it seems like this accounts for > 80% of pilot-controller communication.

It's strange to me that, given the amount of automation in a modern airliner, these instructions aren't transmitted digitally directly to the autopilot. Instead of the controller verbally telling the pilot where to go, it seems feasible that the controller (or some coordinating software) could just digitally tell the plane where to go.

I feel like that's how you dramatically decrease workload on both ends, and then maybe there's more bandwidth to focus on those takeoff clearances (and eventually automate those as well?).

So many other aspects of flight safety have been handed over to the computer to solve, it's curious to me why a critical function like air traffic control still happens verbally over VHF.

I think this is ultimately true, in a sense, but the challenge is correctly handling all of the edge-cases. It's a challenging problem tantamount to the self-driving car problem.

It happens by humans over VHF because a lot of unpredictable things happen in busy airspace, and it would require a massive investment for machines to automate all of it.

I'm also not sure that people would accept the safety risk of airplanes' autopilots being given automated instructions by ATC over the air. There's a large potential vulnerability and safety risk there. I think there's some potential for automation to replace the role of ATC currently, but I suspect it would still be by transmitting instructions to human pilots, not directly to the autopilot.

Lastly, for such a system to ever be bootstrapped, it would still need to handle all of the planes that didn't have this automation yet; it would still need to support communicating with pilots verbally over VHF. An entirely AI ATC system, that autonomously listens to and responds by voice over VHF seems like a plausible first step though.

Can any aircraft navigation system plot drone Remote ID beacons on a map?

How sensitive of a sensor array is necessary to trilaterate Remote ID signals and birds for aircraft collision avoidance?

A Multispectral sensor array (standard) would probably be most robust.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40276191 :

> Are there autopilot systems that do any sort of drone, bird, or other aerial object avoidance?