Let’s get the definitions straight: TRACONs typically exercise control jurisdiction over IFR aircraft and advisory responsibility for participating VFR aircraft from 500′ AGL to roughly 10,000 MSL, mostly in Class E airspace. I suppose that Class B airspace might be the first to be managed properly by computers, since the software wouldn’t have to predict the actions of aircraft that aren’t within its control jurisdiction. (It would still have to deal with emergencies, deviations due to weather, VFR aircraft unable to follow instructions while remaining clear of clouds, and other factors). Any such system that required new equipment in aircraft would fail, simply due to the political power of AOPA and other pilots’ organizations; requiring a $5-10k upgrade to every aircraft simply isn’t on the table.
Computers might be marginally better at handling high-volume routine situations, and a solution that provided computer assistance to pilots and allowed pilots to make more decisions might provide improvements. Computers might be well suited to controlling Class A airspace, because of the relative predictability there and lack of visual separation, but they simply are not well developed enough to provide vectors for a visual approach around clouds, a task which combined tower/TRACON controllers can and do perform. Anything short of a General AI is simply never going to be able to handle the airport environment, even to the point of observing the current weather conditions and selecting a runway configuration, much less to the point of dealing with snow removal situations, wildlife, vehicle or pedestrian deviations, blown tires, and emergency situations.
I also disagree that weakening NATCA is a step towards improving efficiency and safety, and none of the experience that you claimed indicates that you have any basis to observe any of the safety initiatives forced through by the union (like required rest periods, ATSAP reporting, and cultural changes toward a solution-oriented vice a blame-oriented culture.)
And your opinion is factually wrong; more problems occur in the airport environment than in the terminal environment. That’s also where visual separation is most often used and where virtually all emergencies end up being resolved. Small things, like replacing a centerline light on an active runway, can be handled easily by people and their ability to create fuzzy plans; I can not conceive of any traditional computer that could handle that situation without the airport NOTAM closing the runway.
Dude. Chill. By “within the TRACON” I meant to include the airport, which I think of as within the TRACON because I never had anything to do with airport controllers. They have the hardest job, yes. That was why all the theorizing about en-route airspace didn’t really help; delays almost always come back to runway problems.
I said the union has to be weakened because most en-route controllers should be replaced by computers, and the union won’t let that happen. The union wants to keep computers out of it and humans in it, and no amount of required rest periods (which, yes, I know about, and it’s pretty cheap of you to try to discredit me because I didn’t decide to talk about rest periods in a SINGLE PARAGRAPH’S discussion of ATC) will change the fact that computers are better than humans at keeping lots of vectors from intersecting.
On the other hand, most accidents and near-misses happen on and near the tarmac, and that’s not going to be computerized anytime soon. So I guess we can leave the union alone for now. And, in fact, we never got near the union anyway—when I left, the battle for automation was still between NASA and the FAA, and NASA has no power.
The TRACON is more like the enroute center than it is like the tower. Did you spend enough time with TMU to realize that the only ways to reduce delays due to volume is to increase the capacity of the airport or reduce the number of departures to the airport?
BOS learned that lesson well, and they cut everybody’s delay time significantly by allowing a circling approach to a shorter runway (ceiling permitting). Not everybody can make the approach, but the ones that can are exempt from the delays because they don’t use a scarce resource.
Again, keeping the vectors from intersecting is a tiny fraction of the job of controlling, even if that is what they mostly do. The big fraction is stuff like identifying the symptoms of hypoxia in pilots, talking the passenger of a heart attack victim onto a runway, and giving the pilot of an Airbus with severe birdstrike damage every option available.
Humans scale very well when you can divide their responsibilities clearly; the workload of a controller in a sector that has N operations per hour scales roughly with N, regardless of the size of the sector within reasonable limits. A computer system that identified and suggested corrections and changes in the enroute (or even the TRACON) environment would probably improve safety, but it would only reduce delays if it was responsible for maintaining specified separation on final, and did a better job than humans do. There are a lot of failure modes in vectoring for a final.
When you characterize controllers as being ambivalent about safety and acting to preserve their jobs, you are victim of and contributing to a false stereotype of unions and union employees. Everyone in professional aviation takes safety very seriously, and no silicon-based computer system currently in existence can respond to novel situations as well as a human can.
Let’s get the definitions straight: TRACONs typically exercise control jurisdiction over IFR aircraft and advisory responsibility for participating VFR aircraft from 500′ AGL to roughly 10,000 MSL, mostly in Class E airspace. I suppose that Class B airspace might be the first to be managed properly by computers, since the software wouldn’t have to predict the actions of aircraft that aren’t within its control jurisdiction. (It would still have to deal with emergencies, deviations due to weather, VFR aircraft unable to follow instructions while remaining clear of clouds, and other factors). Any such system that required new equipment in aircraft would fail, simply due to the political power of AOPA and other pilots’ organizations; requiring a $5-10k upgrade to every aircraft simply isn’t on the table.
Computers might be marginally better at handling high-volume routine situations, and a solution that provided computer assistance to pilots and allowed pilots to make more decisions might provide improvements. Computers might be well suited to controlling Class A airspace, because of the relative predictability there and lack of visual separation, but they simply are not well developed enough to provide vectors for a visual approach around clouds, a task which combined tower/TRACON controllers can and do perform. Anything short of a General AI is simply never going to be able to handle the airport environment, even to the point of observing the current weather conditions and selecting a runway configuration, much less to the point of dealing with snow removal situations, wildlife, vehicle or pedestrian deviations, blown tires, and emergency situations.
I also disagree that weakening NATCA is a step towards improving efficiency and safety, and none of the experience that you claimed indicates that you have any basis to observe any of the safety initiatives forced through by the union (like required rest periods, ATSAP reporting, and cultural changes toward a solution-oriented vice a blame-oriented culture.)
And your opinion is factually wrong; more problems occur in the airport environment than in the terminal environment. That’s also where visual separation is most often used and where virtually all emergencies end up being resolved. Small things, like replacing a centerline light on an active runway, can be handled easily by people and their ability to create fuzzy plans; I can not conceive of any traditional computer that could handle that situation without the airport NOTAM closing the runway.
Dude. Chill. By “within the TRACON” I meant to include the airport, which I think of as within the TRACON because I never had anything to do with airport controllers. They have the hardest job, yes. That was why all the theorizing about en-route airspace didn’t really help; delays almost always come back to runway problems.
I said the union has to be weakened because most en-route controllers should be replaced by computers, and the union won’t let that happen. The union wants to keep computers out of it and humans in it, and no amount of required rest periods (which, yes, I know about, and it’s pretty cheap of you to try to discredit me because I didn’t decide to talk about rest periods in a SINGLE PARAGRAPH’S discussion of ATC) will change the fact that computers are better than humans at keeping lots of vectors from intersecting.
On the other hand, most accidents and near-misses happen on and near the tarmac, and that’s not going to be computerized anytime soon. So I guess we can leave the union alone for now. And, in fact, we never got near the union anyway—when I left, the battle for automation was still between NASA and the FAA, and NASA has no power.
The TRACON is more like the enroute center than it is like the tower. Did you spend enough time with TMU to realize that the only ways to reduce delays due to volume is to increase the capacity of the airport or reduce the number of departures to the airport? BOS learned that lesson well, and they cut everybody’s delay time significantly by allowing a circling approach to a shorter runway (ceiling permitting). Not everybody can make the approach, but the ones that can are exempt from the delays because they don’t use a scarce resource. Again, keeping the vectors from intersecting is a tiny fraction of the job of controlling, even if that is what they mostly do. The big fraction is stuff like identifying the symptoms of hypoxia in pilots, talking the passenger of a heart attack victim onto a runway, and giving the pilot of an Airbus with severe birdstrike damage every option available. Humans scale very well when you can divide their responsibilities clearly; the workload of a controller in a sector that has N operations per hour scales roughly with N, regardless of the size of the sector within reasonable limits. A computer system that identified and suggested corrections and changes in the enroute (or even the TRACON) environment would probably improve safety, but it would only reduce delays if it was responsible for maintaining specified separation on final, and did a better job than humans do. There are a lot of failure modes in vectoring for a final. When you characterize controllers as being ambivalent about safety and acting to preserve their jobs, you are victim of and contributing to a false stereotype of unions and union employees. Everyone in professional aviation takes safety very seriously, and no silicon-based computer system currently in existence can respond to novel situations as well as a human can.