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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

#111

Post by csours »

kristian1109 wrote: post #66
csours wrote: post #51

The current rash of airline incidents reminds me of the assembly instruction: Torque fastener until you hear expensive sounds and then back off a quarter turn. We've accelerated past our capabilities and need to slow down. ATC has incentive to slot takeoffs and landings as close as possible, but that is in tension with the goal of safety. > Air traffic control from first principles looks significantly more automated.…

No stress, appreciate you chiming in. > We've accelerated past our capabilities and need to slow down. This is a super interesting meditation. As much work as there is to be done now, the demand for air traffic is growing and power laws are concentrating it into tight airspace bubbles. It would behoove us to figure out how to make airspace more dense without compromising safety. There's lots of good economic incentiv…

> how to make airspace more dense without compromising safety.

My suggestion would be to make things as repeatable and consistent as possible. This would mean forcing some airports to change their practices to be consistent with everyone else, and forcing physical layout changes and construction. Unfortunately an app can't do that =( ... and the benefits are on the other side of a paradigm shift, so it's hard to make it happen naturally.

>> more dense

Large, high passenger capacity airliners have gone out of style but that would have been the best way to get passenger density up.

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

#112

Post by someguydave »

kristian1109 wrote: post #60
RockyMcNuts wrote: post #48

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 problem with datalink systems is they are poor substitutes for immediate control & confirmation. My co-founder Eric wrote a short piece about this: https://www.ericbutton.co/p/speech . This is why they are mainly relegated to low-urgency en-route & clearance delivery.

He’s write about the bandwidth and latency of voice, but the problem is that you can’t immediately know who should react to instructions. “GO AROUND IMMEDIATE!” - now all the pilots on frequency are wondering who’s the addressee

Also, AM voice on VHF is not full duplex and the blocking problem is very real and could be addressed potentially

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

#113

Post by flight-plan-fly »

Neat! I have been thinking of trying to build something like this as a side project, but knew it would be difficult to get good results without having a team of aviation folks labeling data.

Do you think your model's word error rate would decrease if it had access to raw feeds from towers or was trained on data from even more airports?

Do you have any plans to make the data searchable/discoverable in real time? Something like being able to search for any audio transmissions regarding a specific flight by number, etc., available on ADS-B exchange, Flightradar, FlightAware, etc., both in text and audio form.

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

#114

Post by RachelF »

kristian1109 wrote: post #44
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 availabl…

Thank you for the detailed reply. Your first product sounds like something that is needed. I wish your startup very good luck and will be watching your progress.

Do ground vehicles also have GPS trackers with a radio transmitter, or do they just use normal ADS-B?

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

#115

Post by kristian1109 »

flight-plan-fly wrote: post #113

Neat! I have been thinking of trying to build something like this as a side project, but knew it would be difficult to get good results without having a team of aviation folks labeling data. Do you think your model's word error rate would decrease if it had access to raw feeds from towers or was trained on data from even more airports? Do you have any plans to make the data searchable/discoverable in real time? Somet…

> Do you think your model's word error rate would decrease if it had access to raw feeds from towers or was trained on data from even more airports?

Yes, especially for local things like navaids, cities, etc. Our expectation is that we'll need to fine-tune for different deployments.

> Do you have any plans to make the data searchable/discoverable in real time? Something like being able to search for any audio transmissions regarding a specific flight by number, etc., available on ADS-B exchange, Flightradar, FlightAware, etc., both in text and audio form.

Definitely! This actually already exists and we're selling it to airports today.

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

#116

Post by YZF »

I like the idea. I used to be a military air traffic controller (for about 3 years) and have seen a few cases of issues between ground traffic, either vehicles, or helicopters or other airplanes and airplanes landing or taking off. We had a somewhat imperfect system of tracking whether runways were free or in use.

Relying solely on speech recognition seems a little tricky though. Either way you'll probably want to involve someone from the ATC side sooner rather than later.

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

#117

Post by zeroc8 »

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-…

The teaching tools nowadays available to CFIs are fantastic. Get yourself X-Plane 12, Honeycomb yoke, throttles and rudders and a decent aircraft like the Challenger 650 and you are good to go. All of this can be had for around 1000 bucks and is the best investment anyone can make to stay current. I used to be a CFII a long time ago (1995) when sims where expensive and only the best flight schools had them. Back then, instrument training was flying long and boring hours under the hood and if you were lucky, one or two hours actual IFR. Most people were afraid to fly real IFR after the rating, since they were aware that the training was so bad, myself included. A couple of hours flying a PC sim fixed this problem once and forever and made a huge difference in real world flying.
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