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

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61–70 of 118 posts

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

#61

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…

Yes, this is an excellent prompt and we're working on it. One problem is a lot of these visual sources require permission, integration, and regulation. That's going to move slower than something we can proceed directly with (VHF antennas).

I believe scaling laws will hold as we start to feed all of this context data into an integrated model. You could imagine a deep-q style reinforcement learning model that ingests layers of structured and visual data and outputs alerts and eventually commands. The main challenge I foresee here will be observability... it's easy enough to shove a ton of data into a black box and get a good answer 98% of the time. But regulation is likely to require such a system to be highly observable/explainable so the human can keep up with what's going on and step in as needed.

Looking further into the future, it's plausible the concrete structures of today with humans looking out windows will be replaced with sensor packages atop a long flagpole that stream high-res optical/ir camera data, surface radar, weather information, etc into a control room with VR layers that help controllers stay on top of busier and busier airspace.

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

#62

What's your intended model for this? Pitch to air traffic management as their additional safety net or sell direct to operators/pilots as a warning service?

Short answer: both.

Pitching air traffic management is going to be a years long process.

Getting certified for on-board avionics is similarly challenging.

In the meantime, we'll get better and better at monitoring the airspace system and deploy that technology into unregulated applications like post-operational roles.

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

#64
Pretty cool use of NLP. I wonder if training schools can use this to train their students to improve their readback detection. IMO, one of the hardest things as a pilot in training in the first few months is getting feedback on my communication with the tower.

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

#65

IMO one of the only interesting things "block chain" tech ever produced that had real world value and potential to save lives. https://aviationsystems.arc.nasa.gov/publications/2019/SciTe... Curious if OP has seen this paper / project before?

Interesting paper, thanks for sharing here. Encrypting ADS-B is a whole discussion... in my opinion, it's a good thing to have largely public location data for folks to consume and study.

What were your main takeaways from this paper?

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

#66
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 incentive for this.

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

#67

Pretty cool use of NLP. I wonder if training schools can use this to train their students to improve their readback detection. IMO, one of the hardest things as a pilot in training in the first few months is getting feedback on my communication with the tower.

Exactly, this is one of our early beachheads. If we can train better pilots, the airspace system gets safer immediately.

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

#68
post #58
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.

AM modulation is perfectly justified in this context: if two (or more) stations accidentally transmit at the same time, this will be noticed. Using FM, only the stronger signal wins and the other signal remains undetected. The advantage over digital transmission is the lack of coding overhead - the voice reaches the receiver without any time delay.

This is true, for anybody curious about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_effect

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

#69
post #57
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's been a long time since I worked in flight simulation (full flight simulators and simpler pilot training devices, including simulating TCAS), but I believe at that time TCAS would be switched to a mode in which it only alerts of "Traffic" instead of providing avoidance instructions precisely _when_ entering busier airspace -- e.g. airport proximity. In that environment it was undesirable for TCAS to be giving ins…

Good callout, thanks
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