Kind of curious how air traffic control evolved in other countries, and how the international flight system works with handoffs between countries, particularly in Europe and the Caribbean where national borders tend to be relatively small.
In a nutshell it goes like this: you file a flight plan to go from A in country A to B in country B. Every country that you cross will know about this.
Depending if you fly IFR or VFR and at what altitude, you will talk to either a flight information service (FIS), Radar or Area Control Center (ACC).
Hand-off is usually done a few miles from the border of the next country you're going to pass. You tell them who you are and where you're going to. They can let you fly as planned or give you another route or altitude.
From a pilot's point of view is pretty simple and straightforward.
My grandfather flew Typhoons, and they operated 'cab rank' as part of the 2nd Tactical Air Force. The Army would radio in coordinates of German tanks or fortified positions, and the Typhoons would come in with their rockets / bombs / cannons. I wish he was still around so I could ask him how that was done. A central dispatcher? Or did they talk to the Army directly? Not sure.
There was a lot of development around radio navigation aids in the interwar period. I believe it was even possible to navigate using commercial AM radio broadcasts, as long as the location of the broadcasting station was known. So while the basic method was computing location based on speed and compass bearing from a landmark (possibly accounting for wind drift), I believe a certain level of radio navigation was still going on in cases of adverse weather.
Longer-range bomber flights also did it the same way ocean-faring ships have done in the past few hundred years: they had a roof window for taking celestial fixes with a sextant. Come to think of it, that's how the Apollo capsule also confirmed its location.
Some SLBMs (Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles) use star sighting to correct their trajectory mid-flight. ICBMs launched from silos know exactly where they're starting from, whereas a submarine is both moving, at different depths and has some error to knowing exactly where it is. Missiles use inertial guidance, so knowing your starting your point is crucial.
How accurate a missile needs to be is a whole other dimension though. If the value of a missile is as retaliation to destroy a city (countervalue) then it can be a large warhead and "miss" by quite a margin but needs some form of credible survivability of an enemy first strike. If the missile is to be used to destroy enemy military installations (counterforce) then it needs to be a lot more accurate but usually the implication is as a first strike so less survivability is required.
When you have nuclear weapons that you can drop from manned aircraft, ICBMs from silos and SLBMs controlled by different military branches there is going to be a lot of politics over what the missile is for, which will determine its required accuracy, which will be a factor on if it needs star sighting.
The Voyager space probes for sure use visual fixes on guide stars, such as Alpha Centauri (and our own Sun?) to ensure correct orientation. Of course, they don't need to navigate much, since given the relative velocities, their thrusters wouldn't make much difference.
And there is a quite-famous scene in Apollo 13 where they literally line-up the Moon itself in the reticule so that their engine burn puts them on exactly the correct trajectory.
I believe several of these were also used by civilian aviation before and after the war
TL;DR: both sides used systems with multiple ground antennas that allowed pilots to essentially triangulate their position or at least know they're in a given lane.
There were a great number of inventive aerial navigation systems that predate GPS by many decades. One of my favourite books is Most Secret War[0], a biography by R.V. Jones that details much of the cat and mouse that went into detecting and countering the various systems used by the Axis and the Allies to bomb each other.
As an aside, wasn't there some HN post a few months back about how carrier warfare in the Pacific led to more and more complex schemes of ATC, aka "Fighter Directors", including early Naval computers devoted to figuring out where to put airplanes in the right place at the right time right time?
I read in A Bridge Too Far, the Hawker Typhoons that attacked German positions at the start of the Operation (called in by the Forward Air Comtroller), flew under the opening barrage and one Typhoon disintegrated as it was hit by a shell. I've often wondered if there was any system in place to prevent that sort of thing.
Hitting an aircraft in flight was hard enough if you were aiming at it, I doubt they felt any need to take countermeasures against such a rare occurrence.
This piece hit hard. It’s strange how something so invisible to most of us is simultaneously one of the most complex, tightly-coupled systems running in the background of daily life.
But is it that complex? Airplanes arrive in your sector, you write the number and destination on a slip of paper, and put it on your board. You tell the plane, if needed, where to fly, and then you tell it to talk to the next sector controller when it leaves your area.
It seems rather non-complex, and I think it has to be, so it can be robust and offer room for errors etc.
The historical perspective is kind of interesting. What interests me more is how this stuff can be modernized. Because the current byzantine system of task saturating people by making them yell numbers and letters at each other over state of the art 1950s technology for doing so is hardly efficient, scalable, or ultimately secure when it inevitably breaks down under the stresses it induces on pilots and staff involved.
Communication failures and pilot errors are usually major contributing factors to accidents. Pilot errors become more likely when individuals are preoccupied with processing vast amounts of information and demands thrown at them via radio in critical parts of flight (e.g. when finding their way to a runway).
Most of the radio calls today (>95%) are bog standard verbal exchanges about things that should not require any humans in the loop. Anything to with weather is just numbers that can and should be be exchanged digitally. Much faster, less room for error. There should be zero confusion about what the altimeter settings are at a particular airport, what the active runway is, where the wind is coming from, etc.
Anything to do with "who are you and why are you here", which is a disturbingly large proportion of verbal exchanges, sounds like it could be established both more securely, robustly, and efficiently. We have computers now with things like secure hashes, uuids, certificates, etc. Any time you have enough bandwidth to talk to somebody you definitely have enough bandwidth to throw quite a bit of data around securely and reliably.
If you call your granny via whatsapp, facetime, or whatever, there's no need to tell her who you are. Because the app tells her before she even answers. It's completely redundant information. She already knows. There's no valid technical reason why ATC cannot have the same comfort of knowing who they are talking to and what they are flying. It's 2025! Not 1965. ATC should have full context when they talk to people. They shouldn't have to ask for that context verbally. Routine course changes, altitude changes, etc. could be communicated and confirmed via computers. Voice channels should be used for emergencies and non standard situations only.
There are a few things happening in aviation that are making this more urgent after many decades of stagnation in technological changes. Battery electric is going to make flying vastly cheaper and safer than it is today. That's going to increase the amount of relatively inexperienced pilots and plane movements. And secondly, there are an increasing amount of autonomously flying planes, drones, etc. Those are actually going to dominate traffic in the years ahead. Pilots are expensive and are becoming kind of redundant. The amount of flights that ATC needs to juggle is going to increase by at lease one or two orders of magnitude.
The current system won't scale with that, it will have to change. Now would be a good time to start figuring that out.
> Routine course changes, altitude changes, etc. could be communicated and confirmed via computers. Voice channels should be used for emergencies and non standard situations only.
Do you think when planes get closer to the airport, pilots want to keep their eyes on the group chat while trying to land? :)
I take your point but simply throwing silicone at the problem doesn't make things all of a sudden better. Wind data can already be uplinked to aircraft through ACARS anyway. The problem is aviation is very dynamic. You can't fly the plane and get a bing bong message cleared to land and not be distracted by it. Voice comms are flawed but one of the benefits is you can hear them and monitor the aircraft state. ATC have systems which add another layer of protection for a misidentified runway for example.
We have digital datalink weather, pilots love it and use it frequently. It would be nice to have D-ATIS at smaller airports, but otherwise weather is a solved problem.
For everything else, voice communications are a feature. Pilots are trained to spend most of their time heads-up looking out the window, not heads-down looking at computer screens. ATC via text message breaks that flow. (We do actually have ATC via text message, using CPDLC. It's most useful on oceanic flights as an alternative to HF radio, where things happen slowly. Once you're getting close to the destination and events speed up, it's back to voice.)
In theory the biggest benefit to CPDLC is uploading a clearance into an FMS automatically, which is already a thing... but even then you have to closely supervise and occasionally step in when it does it incorrectly.
Remember flight MH370? The industry doesn't want obviously good solutions if it costs more than $1 per passenger. There is room to automate part of this, and have ATC and pilot human oversight with manual contingencies. But no one is going to pay for it, not through normal or usual and customary processes. Most of the major US stakeholders (airlines) are poor.
I remember lots of accidents where there was miscommunication, task saturated pilots making mistakes, etc. That's not an excuse to sit on our hands and decide that aviation safety peaked decades ago and that there's no need to modernize.
Also, this is bigger than the US. Aviation is a world wide business. I don't think the Chinese are looking at the FAA for learning how to make drones that they produce interface with Chinese ATC. This might be a case where the US will follow instead of lead.
> Most of the radio calls today (>95%) are bog standard verbal exchanges about things that should not require any humans in the loop. Anything to with weather is just numbers that can and should be be exchanged digitally. Much faster, less room for error. There should be zero confusion about what the altimeter settings are at a particular airport, what the active runway is, where the wind is coming from, etc.
> Anything to do with "who are you and why are you here", which is a disturbingly large proportion of verbal exchanges, sounds like it could be established both more securely, robustly, and efficiently. We have computers now with things like secure hashes, uuids, certificates, etc. Any time you have enough bandwidth to talk to somebody you definitely have enough bandwidth to throw quite a bit of data around securely and reliably.
The problem is, for that to work, you'd need to push a worldwide coordinated effort to upgrade everyone. Hundreds of thousands of GA aircraft, historical aircraft, about 30k commercial aircraft and most likely hundreds if not thousands of different models. For each of these you'd need to develop and most importantly certify a digital avionics package. And you'd need to train about half a million pilots for commercial flight, on top of that all the GA pilots.
And no, "give pilots an iPad" doesn't count. That's what many airlines are already doing so pilots have an alternative to paper charts of approaches or on-ground navigation... but the old paper and radio? That all still has gotta be present because that stuff is actually certified to be redundant and (largely) fail-proof.
There's a reason innovation speed is very slow in aviation: it took decades worth of work and many thousands of deaths to get aviation to be what it is: the most safe way of transportation by far. You probably have a higher chance of getting hit by a drunk driver than to even get a small injury on a commercial airplane, because all the failure modes of airplanes and individual parts have been worked out. Every kind of new part, new systems and new material introduces new failure modes that have to be discovered, mitigated and the mitigation be distributed around the world.
You are describing why something that hasn't changed for decades won't change for decades. Because nothing ever changes. All of that stops being true when change is forced. My closing argument provides that change vector: a couple of orders of magnitude increase in flight movements and autonomous flight.
From a technical and practical point of view this stuff isn't actually hard: you start with the big airlines. Maintaining and refurbishing airplanes is something they spend lots of money on. Hundreds of thousands per plane per year. So, there's plenty of budget and a little bit of new equipment won't really move the needle.
Just look at how quickly ipads got adopted by pilots. Many pilots won't fly without one now. Reason: they are good and they provide redundancy when the multi million thing in front of them has an electrical failure. It provides GPS, can talk to ADSB via bluetooth. You can have an artificial horizon on it, etc. Pilots won't use them as a primary instrument (that would be illegal) but they are well capable as an emergency replacement with the right apps. This industry can move fast when it needs to. Ipads are cheap. They provide convenience and safety. So pretty much any pilot will want one in their plane.
The issue isn't technical but bureaucratic. If ipads had to have gone through some FAA controlled design committee, they would never have gotten this popular. But they didn't. The history of this stuff is that airlines got organized first before the FAA took over. They'll have to force these changes.
> From a technical and practical point of view this stuff isn't actually hard: you start with the big airlines.
You still need to get any new integration certified, and not just on the plane side, but also on the ground. And it's ... problematic because you would then have two wildly different systems in parallel, and pilots would need to switch between radio and digital all the time. Too much potential for chaos.
This involved a completely nonsensical and arbitrary biographical screening test, which:
1. was designed to statistically select for members of favored identity groups and against members of disfavored identity groups, and not in any way to measure ATC job aptitude, resulting in highly-scored questions like "The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was" where the only correct answer was "Science", and failing the test disqualified you permanently
2. then-current FAA employees distributed the exact answer key to outside racial identity organizations to give to their members
15. The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:
A. SCIENCE (+15)
B. MATH (0)
C. ENGLISH (0)
D. HISTORY/SOCIAL SCIENCES (0)
E. PHYSICAL EDUCATION (0)
16. Of the following, the college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:
A. SCIENCE (0)
B. MATH (0)
C. ENGLISH (0)
D. HISTORY/POLITICAL SCIENCE (+15)
E. DID NOT ATTEND COLLEGE (0)
29. My peers would probably say that having someone criticize my performance (i.e. point out a mistake) bothers me:
A. MUCH LESS THAN MOST (+8)
B. SOMEWHAT LESS THAN MOST (+4)
C. ABOUT THE SAME AS MOST (+8)
D. SOMEWHAT MORE THAN MOST (0)
E. MUCH MORE THAN MOST (+10)
The first link describes it as one half of a two-step screen where there are known biases in the second step, and there are far more applicants than positions. So the entire point of this quiz is for it to have a deliberate designed complementary bias, so that the outcome of the two tests combined gave a score that was statistically correlated with the desired results and NOT statistically correlated with characteristics they did not find useful.
Is your argument that this is a bad goal to have, or a bad method of approach, or that the quiz created cannot possibly achieve this goal?
“We’re going to flip a coin and if it’s heads and you guessed tails then you're fired, but it’s okay because our research shows that people of your racial group are more likely to guess tails and we think there are too many of your kind around”
Yea - if the end goal of "there are >x qualified applicants, so give me x acceptances where all of them are qualified and the ratio of group1/group2 in acceptances matches the ratio in the applicants" was met, and nobody could see how race came into the test, I don't think anyone would complain. (For instance if they'd waited 20 years and wrapped it in AI, or maybe if they'd just added it as an additional section in the test. It seems that everyone agreed some qualified applicants weren't going to make it through because there were more of them than acceptances.)
My understanding is that people complained a) because it did not meet that goal of all acceptances going to qualified applicants, but I certainly haven't read enough to judge that and b) the rollout sounds like a chain of poor decisions - even just splitting it into two separate result steps was guaranteed to raise ire from people who got rejected at that new first step, which would have been reduced if they'd simply made it an internal factor calculated at the same time as the exam result.
edit: but I take it that your argument is "that's a bad goal to have"
Been hearing about this super racist DEI questionnaire for a while now. I cannot believe this is what people have been talking about? These are such normal corpo performance review nonsense.
This story has really annoying results, because while there were dumb decisions made about the hiring process, people are also blowing some things out of proportion.
There's lots of terrible personality tests in recruitment and they're sometimes abused for various purposes. This one is just mildly bad compared to for example corpos hiring people to analyse the signature/writing style of the candidate. But handing out the key to that test was just terrible.
Then there's another one where people reacted strongly to someone handing out highly scoring words for the resume... where the words would be included in any basic coaching like "leader", "ownership", "delivered", etc.
It's hard to even talk about this when people have kneejerk response to a few key phrases here.
Given the previous discussion on that very thread has 703 comments, your, "I don't think there's any debate that [...] and the FAA really did blow up its hiring pipeline to further DEI goals" is pretty provably false.
While there was over 10 times as many applicants as there were spots, there were people that went to college and studied ATC who weren't able to become Air Traffic Controllers because of the Biographical Questionnaire.
You can't say an opinion is false - it's an opinion.
The fact is though, that the Biographical Questionaire affected hiring. Did it make a noticeable difference though? Who knows. We just know for certain that people who studied for this job didn't get in.
> You can't say an opinion is false - it's an opinion.
I agree that op thought:
> [that] there's [no] debate that ATC staffing is a major issue right now, and the FAA really did blow up its hiring pipeline to further DEI goals
Grandparent only said that there is clearly debate over this.
To say that no-one can disagree with op, or point out an opposing point of view, because is their opinion, is not furthering discussion.
That’s some new term for an effort to create more inclusive institutions, nearly unavoidably at the expense of the traditionally privileged - inevitably it’s taken too far, it crosses a line, even if the cross and the line itself must be manufactured by the resident reactionaries - and it becomes yet another rallying, cry for conservatives, another neat little entry in the portfolio of pogroms against progress.
Given the fact that I went from +3 to -2, for a very factual statement (the standard deviation of comments on the front page at the time was 65.0) yeah.
Yeah you are papermanning the comment, and that aint cool.
Given the strength of the posted article (by Tracing Woodgrains) I cannot see the debate either. It is airtight. Non partisan. Nuanced. Stone uncovering. Dozens of references. Led to real world change (albeit unfortunately not in the best way due to politics). It's an A+++ article. I need heavy convincing that it is flawed.
Forget how many HN comments because who cared. Is there any debate that Steve Jobs died? No. That got 1000s of comments. Yes I papermanned your paperman there see!
Rather than point to an irrelevant factoid, what is the factual issue in that article, if any?
I think you're missing the context of the article the grandparent was quoting. The article begins:
> Air traffic control has been in the news lately, on account of my country's declining ability to do it. Well, that's a long-term trend, resulting from decades of under-investment, severe capture by our increasingly incompetent defense-industrial complex, no small degree of management incompetence in the FAA, and long-lasting effects of Reagan crushing the PATCO strike. But that's just my opinion, you know, maybe airplanes got too woke.
So when the grandparent quoted
> maybe airplanes got too woke
and THEN says "I don't think there's any debate that ATC staffing is a major issue right now, and the FAA really did blow up its hiring pipeline to further DEI goals", what does that quote add?
I read an implicit statement that the commenter is siding with this as the cause of the industry problems: "I don't think there's any debate that" [it is, in fact, wokeness that has caused the industry problems]. And I don't think their linked article does make an airtight argument for this.
Perhaps you think the steelman version of the comment simply treats the quoted fragment as an accident, or irrelevant to the rest of it, but I disagree.
That questionnaire looks bad but from these links I didn't see a clear evaluation of impact on hiring number. It doesn't sound like recruitment was going great to begin with?
I read through the list. It seems to be standard Meyers-Briggs type questions. I don't think that this is that useful a metric, but I have been given similar questions by private sector companies and was also given a weirder one by the patent office in 2006.
If you look at how they're scored, it's worse than Meyers-Briggs. Wanting a specific personality type for the job makes a lot more sense than many of these. Most don't give any points, many have labels that increase in number but the points aren't logically related to them (unemployed for 3-4 months before this job? No points for you! 1-2 or 5-6? Have a lot of points!). Even ignoring the rest of the story, it's a very flawed test.
Questions about school, personality and experience? That's... just about normal to fill out for corp jobs. It's questionable if it's useful, but it's very common, far from batshit insane.
The insanity is in the scoring for it. You should try out the quiz and see how many questions are graded in a way that you expect. Although I did pass, purely due to being bad at history in college.
I've seen worse tests. It's stupid, but it's weird how aggressive people seem about it now compared to this topic getting lots of attention in the industry over decades now. Even this year WSJ mentions astrology, numerology, graphology in business https://archive.is/ZvJKX
So why is this specific case something that seems to get people out with pitchforks? There are thousands of other cases and they should've been all laughed at until nobody proposes a personality test again. It's all bad and the attention on this one case makes me doubt people genuinely care about profiling and broken hiring in general. (Rather than joining the dei-bad bandwagon)
Because, unlike most professions, ATC is immediately, personally responsible for making decisions for which a slight mistake could instantly claim the lives of hundreds of people.
We've not heard of anyone not qualified getting a job, only not hiring enough people. This has been an issue for many many years now. On the other hand there's lots of other professions with their own profiled hiring issues that claim lives over extended periods of time. So yeah, it still smells like an artificially popular topic. Especially since many changes have already been made this year but we're still seeing the same gripes reposted - but https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/us-transportati... hasn't been posted even once.
They hired more people who then failed the academy and the FAA only has budget for a fixed number of seats. This resulted in a shortage of trainees making it to towers.
This is often said, but misses entirely the forest for the trees.
The ATC shortage is not in the pipeline of candidates, so this is irrelevant - in fact there's a backlog of people who have been accepted. It's in the training of those candidates - because it's an intensive training there isn't enough staff to increase the amount of people being trained at the same time, which is very insufficient. Furthermore, after finishing their training, folks are posted randomly and some refuse (and thus leave the ATC job) because they don't want to move them and any potential family to the middle of nowhere.
Kind of curious how air traffic control evolved in other countries, and how the international flight system works with handoffs between countries, particularly in Europe and the Caribbean where national borders tend to be relatively small.
In a nutshell it goes like this: you file a flight plan to go from A in country A to B in country B. Every country that you cross will know about this.
Depending if you fly IFR or VFR and at what altitude, you will talk to either a flight information service (FIS), Radar or Area Control Center (ACC).
Hand-off is usually done a few miles from the border of the next country you're going to pass. You tell them who you are and where you're going to. They can let you fly as planned or give you another route or altitude.
From a pilot's point of view is pretty simple and straightforward.
This was indeed normalized very early on in post WWII european construction:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocontrol
Re WWII use of radio:
My grandfather flew Typhoons, and they operated 'cab rank' as part of the 2nd Tactical Air Force. The Army would radio in coordinates of German tanks or fortified positions, and the Typhoons would come in with their rockets / bombs / cannons. I wish he was still around so I could ask him how that was done. A central dispatcher? Or did they talk to the Army directly? Not sure.
Forward air control would get a map grid or other description of the target from Infantry and Aircraft would be dispatched to the target . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_air_control_operations...
And before GPS they'd reckon their position off of landmarks and terrain?
There was a lot of development around radio navigation aids in the interwar period. I believe it was even possible to navigate using commercial AM radio broadcasts, as long as the location of the broadcasting station was known. So while the basic method was computing location based on speed and compass bearing from a landmark (possibly accounting for wind drift), I believe a certain level of radio navigation was still going on in cases of adverse weather.
Longer-range bomber flights also did it the same way ocean-faring ships have done in the past few hundred years: they had a roof window for taking celestial fixes with a sextant. Come to think of it, that's how the Apollo capsule also confirmed its location.
There's a lot to read about this. This is probably a good start since it branches to many other related articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oboe_(navigation)
> Come to think of it, that's how the Apollo capsule also confirmed its location.
Isn't that still how it's done? - When leaving earth orbit there isn't GPS or such, the guidance to the moon or further still uses star trackers.
I believe star maps are also baked into ICBMs
Some SLBMs (Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles) use star sighting to correct their trajectory mid-flight. ICBMs launched from silos know exactly where they're starting from, whereas a submarine is both moving, at different depths and has some error to knowing exactly where it is. Missiles use inertial guidance, so knowing your starting your point is crucial.
How accurate a missile needs to be is a whole other dimension though. If the value of a missile is as retaliation to destroy a city (countervalue) then it can be a large warhead and "miss" by quite a margin but needs some form of credible survivability of an enemy first strike. If the missile is to be used to destroy enemy military installations (counterforce) then it needs to be a lot more accurate but usually the implication is as a first strike so less survivability is required.
When you have nuclear weapons that you can drop from manned aircraft, ICBMs from silos and SLBMs controlled by different military branches there is going to be a lot of politics over what the missile is for, which will determine its required accuracy, which will be a factor on if it needs star sighting.
The Voyager space probes for sure use visual fixes on guide stars, such as Alpha Centauri (and our own Sun?) to ensure correct orientation. Of course, they don't need to navigate much, since given the relative velocities, their thrusters wouldn't make much difference.
And there is a quite-famous scene in Apollo 13 where they literally line-up the Moon itself in the reticule so that their engine burn puts them on exactly the correct trajectory.
Rad labs volume 2 has a great description of the radio navigation/positioning systems in use at the time: https://archive.org/details/mitradiationlabo0002john/mode/1u...
I believe several of these were also used by civilian aviation before and after the war
TL;DR: both sides used systems with multiple ground antennas that allowed pilots to essentially triangulate their position or at least know they're in a given lane.
There were a great number of inventive aerial navigation systems that predate GPS by many decades. One of my favourite books is Most Secret War[0], a biography by R.V. Jones that details much of the cat and mouse that went into detecting and countering the various systems used by the Axis and the Allies to bomb each other.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1127842.Most_Secret_War
Yup, and there were apparently fake towns set up with lights that the German night bombers would hit instead of the real populated areas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_site
As an aside, wasn't there some HN post a few months back about how carrier warfare in the Pacific led to more and more complex schemes of ATC, aka "Fighter Directors", including early Naval computers devoted to figuring out where to put airplanes in the right place at the right time right time?
I read in A Bridge Too Far, the Hawker Typhoons that attacked German positions at the start of the Operation (called in by the Forward Air Comtroller), flew under the opening barrage and one Typhoon disintegrated as it was hit by a shell. I've often wondered if there was any system in place to prevent that sort of thing.
Hitting an aircraft in flight was hard enough if you were aiming at it, I doubt they felt any need to take countermeasures against such a rare occurrence.
I also read there was some difficulty in target designation as the pilots had different maps, so the grid coordinates were off.
This piece hit hard. It’s strange how something so invisible to most of us is simultaneously one of the most complex, tightly-coupled systems running in the background of daily life.
But is it that complex? Airplanes arrive in your sector, you write the number and destination on a slip of paper, and put it on your board. You tell the plane, if needed, where to fly, and then you tell it to talk to the next sector controller when it leaves your area.
It seems rather non-complex, and I think it has to be, so it can be robust and offer room for errors etc.
The historical perspective is kind of interesting. What interests me more is how this stuff can be modernized. Because the current byzantine system of task saturating people by making them yell numbers and letters at each other over state of the art 1950s technology for doing so is hardly efficient, scalable, or ultimately secure when it inevitably breaks down under the stresses it induces on pilots and staff involved.
Communication failures and pilot errors are usually major contributing factors to accidents. Pilot errors become more likely when individuals are preoccupied with processing vast amounts of information and demands thrown at them via radio in critical parts of flight (e.g. when finding their way to a runway).
Most of the radio calls today (>95%) are bog standard verbal exchanges about things that should not require any humans in the loop. Anything to with weather is just numbers that can and should be be exchanged digitally. Much faster, less room for error. There should be zero confusion about what the altimeter settings are at a particular airport, what the active runway is, where the wind is coming from, etc.
Anything to do with "who are you and why are you here", which is a disturbingly large proportion of verbal exchanges, sounds like it could be established both more securely, robustly, and efficiently. We have computers now with things like secure hashes, uuids, certificates, etc. Any time you have enough bandwidth to talk to somebody you definitely have enough bandwidth to throw quite a bit of data around securely and reliably.
If you call your granny via whatsapp, facetime, or whatever, there's no need to tell her who you are. Because the app tells her before she even answers. It's completely redundant information. She already knows. There's no valid technical reason why ATC cannot have the same comfort of knowing who they are talking to and what they are flying. It's 2025! Not 1965. ATC should have full context when they talk to people. They shouldn't have to ask for that context verbally. Routine course changes, altitude changes, etc. could be communicated and confirmed via computers. Voice channels should be used for emergencies and non standard situations only.
There are a few things happening in aviation that are making this more urgent after many decades of stagnation in technological changes. Battery electric is going to make flying vastly cheaper and safer than it is today. That's going to increase the amount of relatively inexperienced pilots and plane movements. And secondly, there are an increasing amount of autonomously flying planes, drones, etc. Those are actually going to dominate traffic in the years ahead. Pilots are expensive and are becoming kind of redundant. The amount of flights that ATC needs to juggle is going to increase by at lease one or two orders of magnitude.
The current system won't scale with that, it will have to change. Now would be a good time to start figuring that out.
From what you said I take it you're not a pilot.
> Routine course changes, altitude changes, etc. could be communicated and confirmed via computers. Voice channels should be used for emergencies and non standard situations only.
Do you think when planes get closer to the airport, pilots want to keep their eyes on the group chat while trying to land? :)
I take your point but simply throwing silicone at the problem doesn't make things all of a sudden better. Wind data can already be uplinked to aircraft through ACARS anyway. The problem is aviation is very dynamic. You can't fly the plane and get a bing bong message cleared to land and not be distracted by it. Voice comms are flawed but one of the benefits is you can hear them and monitor the aircraft state. ATC have systems which add another layer of protection for a misidentified runway for example.
This is a very good summary of the situation.
We have digital datalink weather, pilots love it and use it frequently. It would be nice to have D-ATIS at smaller airports, but otherwise weather is a solved problem.
For everything else, voice communications are a feature. Pilots are trained to spend most of their time heads-up looking out the window, not heads-down looking at computer screens. ATC via text message breaks that flow. (We do actually have ATC via text message, using CPDLC. It's most useful on oceanic flights as an alternative to HF radio, where things happen slowly. Once you're getting close to the destination and events speed up, it's back to voice.)
In theory the biggest benefit to CPDLC is uploading a clearance into an FMS automatically, which is already a thing... but even then you have to closely supervise and occasionally step in when it does it incorrectly.
> If you call your granny via whatsapp
Remember flight MH370? The industry doesn't want obviously good solutions if it costs more than $1 per passenger. There is room to automate part of this, and have ATC and pilot human oversight with manual contingencies. But no one is going to pay for it, not through normal or usual and customary processes. Most of the major US stakeholders (airlines) are poor.
I remember lots of accidents where there was miscommunication, task saturated pilots making mistakes, etc. That's not an excuse to sit on our hands and decide that aviation safety peaked decades ago and that there's no need to modernize.
Also, this is bigger than the US. Aviation is a world wide business. I don't think the Chinese are looking at the FAA for learning how to make drones that they produce interface with Chinese ATC. This might be a case where the US will follow instead of lead.
> Most of the radio calls today (>95%) are bog standard verbal exchanges about things that should not require any humans in the loop. Anything to with weather is just numbers that can and should be be exchanged digitally. Much faster, less room for error. There should be zero confusion about what the altimeter settings are at a particular airport, what the active runway is, where the wind is coming from, etc.
> Anything to do with "who are you and why are you here", which is a disturbingly large proportion of verbal exchanges, sounds like it could be established both more securely, robustly, and efficiently. We have computers now with things like secure hashes, uuids, certificates, etc. Any time you have enough bandwidth to talk to somebody you definitely have enough bandwidth to throw quite a bit of data around securely and reliably.
The problem is, for that to work, you'd need to push a worldwide coordinated effort to upgrade everyone. Hundreds of thousands of GA aircraft, historical aircraft, about 30k commercial aircraft and most likely hundreds if not thousands of different models. For each of these you'd need to develop and most importantly certify a digital avionics package. And you'd need to train about half a million pilots for commercial flight, on top of that all the GA pilots.
And no, "give pilots an iPad" doesn't count. That's what many airlines are already doing so pilots have an alternative to paper charts of approaches or on-ground navigation... but the old paper and radio? That all still has gotta be present because that stuff is actually certified to be redundant and (largely) fail-proof.
There's a reason innovation speed is very slow in aviation: it took decades worth of work and many thousands of deaths to get aviation to be what it is: the most safe way of transportation by far. You probably have a higher chance of getting hit by a drunk driver than to even get a small injury on a commercial airplane, because all the failure modes of airplanes and individual parts have been worked out. Every kind of new part, new systems and new material introduces new failure modes that have to be discovered, mitigated and the mitigation be distributed around the world.
You are describing why something that hasn't changed for decades won't change for decades. Because nothing ever changes. All of that stops being true when change is forced. My closing argument provides that change vector: a couple of orders of magnitude increase in flight movements and autonomous flight.
From a technical and practical point of view this stuff isn't actually hard: you start with the big airlines. Maintaining and refurbishing airplanes is something they spend lots of money on. Hundreds of thousands per plane per year. So, there's plenty of budget and a little bit of new equipment won't really move the needle.
Just look at how quickly ipads got adopted by pilots. Many pilots won't fly without one now. Reason: they are good and they provide redundancy when the multi million thing in front of them has an electrical failure. It provides GPS, can talk to ADSB via bluetooth. You can have an artificial horizon on it, etc. Pilots won't use them as a primary instrument (that would be illegal) but they are well capable as an emergency replacement with the right apps. This industry can move fast when it needs to. Ipads are cheap. They provide convenience and safety. So pretty much any pilot will want one in their plane.
The issue isn't technical but bureaucratic. If ipads had to have gone through some FAA controlled design committee, they would never have gotten this popular. But they didn't. The history of this stuff is that airlines got organized first before the FAA took over. They'll have to force these changes.
> From a technical and practical point of view this stuff isn't actually hard: you start with the big airlines.
You still need to get any new integration certified, and not just on the plane side, but also on the ground. And it's ... problematic because you would then have two wildly different systems in parallel, and pilots would need to switch between radio and digital all the time. Too much potential for chaos.
"maybe airplanes got too woke"
I don't think there's any debate that ATC staffing is a major issue right now, and the FAA really did blow up its hiring pipeline to further DEI goals
Cf https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
This involved a completely nonsensical and arbitrary biographical screening test, which:
1. was designed to statistically select for members of favored identity groups and against members of disfavored identity groups, and not in any way to measure ATC job aptitude, resulting in highly-scored questions like "The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was" where the only correct answer was "Science", and failing the test disqualified you permanently
2. then-current FAA employees distributed the exact answer key to outside racial identity organizations to give to their members
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4542755/139/24/brigida-...
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Example questions with the score given for each answer:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.182...
The first link describes it as one half of a two-step screen where there are known biases in the second step, and there are far more applicants than positions. So the entire point of this quiz is for it to have a deliberate designed complementary bias, so that the outcome of the two tests combined gave a score that was statistically correlated with the desired results and NOT statistically correlated with characteristics they did not find useful.
Is your argument that this is a bad goal to have, or a bad method of approach, or that the quiz created cannot possibly achieve this goal?
“We’re going to flip a coin and if it’s heads and you guessed tails then you're fired, but it’s okay because our research shows that people of your racial group are more likely to guess tails and we think there are too many of your kind around”
Yea - if the end goal of "there are >x qualified applicants, so give me x acceptances where all of them are qualified and the ratio of group1/group2 in acceptances matches the ratio in the applicants" was met, and nobody could see how race came into the test, I don't think anyone would complain. (For instance if they'd waited 20 years and wrapped it in AI, or maybe if they'd just added it as an additional section in the test. It seems that everyone agreed some qualified applicants weren't going to make it through because there were more of them than acceptances.)
My understanding is that people complained a) because it did not meet that goal of all acceptances going to qualified applicants, but I certainly haven't read enough to judge that and b) the rollout sounds like a chain of poor decisions - even just splitting it into two separate result steps was guaranteed to raise ire from people who got rejected at that new first step, which would have been reduced if they'd simply made it an internal factor calculated at the same time as the exam result.
edit: but I take it that your argument is "that's a bad goal to have"
You have many qualified applicants. Your hiring process is biased, and lets more green people through than blue people.
Your task is to fix your process so the proportions of green and blue are closer to those of the general population.
How?
You can probably come up with a better design. But I'm not sure that, at core, it would be much different from this.
Been hearing about this super racist DEI questionnaire for a while now. I cannot believe this is what people have been talking about? These are such normal corpo performance review nonsense.
Is this real? Has the person responsible for this been fired yet?
When was the list time you heard of a federal employee getting fired that wasn't the result of a criminal offense? Recent events notwithstanding.
This story has really annoying results, because while there were dumb decisions made about the hiring process, people are also blowing some things out of proportion.
There's lots of terrible personality tests in recruitment and they're sometimes abused for various purposes. This one is just mildly bad compared to for example corpos hiring people to analyse the signature/writing style of the candidate. But handing out the key to that test was just terrible.
Then there's another one where people reacted strongly to someone handing out highly scoring words for the resume... where the words would be included in any basic coaching like "leader", "ownership", "delivered", etc.
It's hard to even talk about this when people have kneejerk response to a few key phrases here.
Given the previous discussion on that very thread has 703 comments, your, "I don't think there's any debate that [...] and the FAA really did blow up its hiring pipeline to further DEI goals" is pretty provably false.
While there was over 10 times as many applicants as there were spots, there were people that went to college and studied ATC who weren't able to become Air Traffic Controllers because of the Biographical Questionnaire.
You can't say an opinion is false - it's an opinion.
The fact is though, that the Biographical Questionaire affected hiring. Did it make a noticeable difference though? Who knows. We just know for certain that people who studied for this job didn't get in.
I don't think that your last statement really matches the claim that the FAA blew up the hiring pipeline, though.
When you say "I don't think there is a debate" and then someone points out there is a debate, you are sorta proven wrong!
> You can't say an opinion is false - it's an opinion.
I agree that op thought: > [that] there's [no] debate that ATC staffing is a major issue right now, and the FAA really did blow up its hiring pipeline to further DEI goals
Grandparent only said that there is clearly debate over this.
To say that no-one can disagree with op, or point out an opposing point of view, because is their opinion, is not furthering discussion.
That would really depend on the comments.
Handwavey claims of “DEI” and “woke” are going to be the go-to vague scapegoats for everything, for the next four years at least.
Well yeah - that’s how the lifecycle works.
That’s some new term for an effort to create more inclusive institutions, nearly unavoidably at the expense of the traditionally privileged - inevitably it’s taken too far, it crosses a line, even if the cross and the line itself must be manufactured by the resident reactionaries - and it becomes yet another rallying, cry for conservatives, another neat little entry in the portfolio of pogroms against progress.
Given the fact that I went from +3 to -2, for a very factual statement (the standard deviation of comments on the front page at the time was 65.0) yeah.
Yeah you are papermanning the comment, and that aint cool.
Given the strength of the posted article (by Tracing Woodgrains) I cannot see the debate either. It is airtight. Non partisan. Nuanced. Stone uncovering. Dozens of references. Led to real world change (albeit unfortunately not in the best way due to politics). It's an A+++ article. I need heavy convincing that it is flawed.
Forget how many HN comments because who cared. Is there any debate that Steve Jobs died? No. That got 1000s of comments. Yes I papermanned your paperman there see!
Rather than point to an irrelevant factoid, what is the factual issue in that article, if any?
I think you're missing the context of the article the grandparent was quoting. The article begins:
> Air traffic control has been in the news lately, on account of my country's declining ability to do it. Well, that's a long-term trend, resulting from decades of under-investment, severe capture by our increasingly incompetent defense-industrial complex, no small degree of management incompetence in the FAA, and long-lasting effects of Reagan crushing the PATCO strike. But that's just my opinion, you know, maybe airplanes got too woke.
So when the grandparent quoted
> maybe airplanes got too woke
and THEN says "I don't think there's any debate that ATC staffing is a major issue right now, and the FAA really did blow up its hiring pipeline to further DEI goals", what does that quote add?
I read an implicit statement that the commenter is siding with this as the cause of the industry problems: "I don't think there's any debate that" [it is, in fact, wokeness that has caused the industry problems]. And I don't think their linked article does make an airtight argument for this.
Perhaps you think the steelman version of the comment simply treats the quoted fragment as an accident, or irrelevant to the rest of it, but I disagree.
Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42944203
This seems like it was pretty bad, but I worry we may be doing the same thing to every federal agency now.
That questionnaire looks bad but from these links I didn't see a clear evaluation of impact on hiring number. It doesn't sound like recruitment was going great to begin with?
The answers to the questionnaire were given to black candidates in a phone call by the people who wrote the thing.
It's Jim Crow Uno Reverse.
The entire hiring pipeline for ATC was autists who love planes, not white people, not Asian people, autists.
That sample hiring quiz (https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment) is batshit insane, to the point I can hardly believe it's real (but it seems like it is?)
I read through the list. It seems to be standard Meyers-Briggs type questions. I don't think that this is that useful a metric, but I have been given similar questions by private sector companies and was also given a weirder one by the patent office in 2006.
If you look at how they're scored, it's worse than Meyers-Briggs. Wanting a specific personality type for the job makes a lot more sense than many of these. Most don't give any points, many have labels that increase in number but the points aren't logically related to them (unemployed for 3-4 months before this job? No points for you! 1-2 or 5-6? Have a lot of points!). Even ignoring the rest of the story, it's a very flawed test.
Questions about school, personality and experience? That's... just about normal to fill out for corp jobs. It's questionable if it's useful, but it's very common, far from batshit insane.
The insanity is in the scoring for it. You should try out the quiz and see how many questions are graded in a way that you expect. Although I did pass, purely due to being bad at history in college.
I've seen worse tests. It's stupid, but it's weird how aggressive people seem about it now compared to this topic getting lots of attention in the industry over decades now. Even this year WSJ mentions astrology, numerology, graphology in business https://archive.is/ZvJKX
So why is this specific case something that seems to get people out with pitchforks? There are thousands of other cases and they should've been all laughed at until nobody proposes a personality test again. It's all bad and the attention on this one case makes me doubt people genuinely care about profiling and broken hiring in general. (Rather than joining the dei-bad bandwagon)
Because, unlike most professions, ATC is immediately, personally responsible for making decisions for which a slight mistake could instantly claim the lives of hundreds of people.
We've not heard of anyone not qualified getting a job, only not hiring enough people. This has been an issue for many many years now. On the other hand there's lots of other professions with their own profiled hiring issues that claim lives over extended periods of time. So yeah, it still smells like an artificially popular topic. Especially since many changes have already been made this year but we're still seeing the same gripes reposted - but https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/us-transportati... hasn't been posted even once.
They hired more people who then failed the academy and the FAA only has budget for a fixed number of seats. This resulted in a shortage of trainees making it to towers.
I had similar for KPMG!
This is often said, but misses entirely the forest for the trees.
The ATC shortage is not in the pipeline of candidates, so this is irrelevant - in fact there's a backlog of people who have been accepted. It's in the training of those candidates - because it's an intensive training there isn't enough staff to increase the amount of people being trained at the same time, which is very insufficient. Furthermore, after finishing their training, folks are posted randomly and some refuse (and thus leave the ATC job) because they don't want to move them and any potential family to the middle of nowhere.
One video by a reliable source (line training captain) on the topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jqa83PrZSVE
When your hiring pipeline is so obliterated that you decide to fire about 400 of your employees. Makes sense.