Unfortunately, the article title is somewhat incomplete, as the restriction on commercial rocket launches is only for certain hours (for now, at least):
> Accordingly, with respect to commercial space launches and reentries, under the
authority provided to the FAA Administrator by 49 U.S.C. §§ 40103, 40113, and 46105(c), and
authority delegated to the FAA Administrator under 51 U.S.C. § 50909(a), it is hereby ordered that, beginning at 6:00 a.m. EST on November 10, 2025, and until this Order is cancelled, Commercial space launches and reentries will only be permitted between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. local time.
> Beginning 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT) on Nov. 10, commercial launches to space can only take place between the hours of 10 p.m. EST (0300 GMT) and 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT), according to the FAA order.
Right, hence "the article title is somewhat incomplete".
I just wanted to make that clear since not everyone reads the article before hopping into the comments and the title could be easily interpreted to prohibit all rocket launches.
The VFR stuff is always optional for ATC. VFR aircraft can request those things and ATC will usually accommodate, but it's workload dependent and ATC can and does decline, that's the whole tradeoff of flying under VFR rules. I'm less sure on the others, but I'm pretty sure they're all optional as well for ATC.
Now the difference might be that ATC will be more likely to deny these requests, which could be somewhat disruptive to flights that were expecting to be approved. But it should never be assumed so hopefully they have backup plans.
In any busy controlled airspace it has never been likely to get flight following, practice approaches, touch and go, etc, and as far as I know controllers have always been allowed to reply to all
of these requests with “unable.”
Flight following has always been available (to me) as I believe they'd rather be talking to you than having you wandering around (completely legally) in VFR without communications. They've vectored me for other traffic, and done the same for me.
The others do directly increase workload and regularly get denied at busy airports (some outright "ban" training activity or charge so much as to make it impractical).
Prudent, yes. But are all of those private aviation? Doesn't commercial civilian and military aviation include any VFR flights? Some of them also sound like emergency/rescue operations.
Nothing will actually stop those VFR flights from still happening, they'll just be less convenient/safe without certain ATC services. If those services are truly required, they can do IFR instead. So can private pilots just flying for fun for that matter, assuming the pilot has the right rating.
> commercial launches to space can only take place between the hours of 10 p.m. EST (0300 GMT) and 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT),
That's going to really piss off everyone around Ventura, CA (they get the sonic-boom when landing a booster on a barge for most launch trajectories from Vandenberg).
As someone who lives close enough to Vandenberg to watch launches from my front porch, this is going to really be disruptive. Squeezing all the launches into the overnight hours is going to be rough.
These orders, while written like they're orders, seem to be suggestions? They first ordered 20% flight reductions at major hubs, and 10% at minor hubs. Now the airlines have cancelled low single digit percentages. This is easily viewable at flightaware. https://www.flightaware.com/live/cancelled/today
I really want this to be the thing that pushes the industry into automated air traffic control.
It's not even technically difficult - we only allow error-prone humans to do the job because of inertia.
Build the system now, and then next time there is a government shutdown or shortage of air traffic controllers, we can say 'only planes equipped with an ipad with automatic air traffic control are allowed to fly'. Within 24h every plane in the nation will be equipped.
ATC is hundreds of functions and dozens of responsibilities like checking that the runway is safe to land. "Clear to land" is not just a turn of phrase, it is a check and verify that an aircraft with hundreds of people is relying on.
Air traffic is not a deterministic system, it is squishy and significantly more complicated because it involves humans, complex mechanical systems, and weather floating on top of a sea of limited resources.
Automating just the error prone radio calls would be a massive start.
Those could be sent as short text messages that appear on a screen in the cockpit, for the pilots to acknowledge receipt of with a limit set of responses, and would give ATC a lot more time to focus on their other duties.
Automating various functions seems like a good idea. But it's not going to remove the humans from the loop in the event of a future government shutdown, which is what the original suggestion seemed to be.
There are a ton of details on the page that go into why it is so hard. One reason is that there are a lot of fundamental things to build and deploy before anything can be automated. E.g. before ADS-B (equipment on planes that detects its own location with GPS and automatically broadcasts it), ATC needed to talk to pilots and ask them where they were in a lot of cases. ADS-B has only been required on commercial flights since 2020.
Then it also suffers like every large government software project where a bunch of $100+ million contracts get paid out to private companies while nothing gets built. And it's part of annual appropriations, so funding was unpredictable. It's like working at a software company that had a major layoff or hiring spree every year for the last 20 years. If we could figure out how to run major project, the value to humanity would be enormous.
This is a ludicrously short sighted post. Do you know what ATC actually involves? It involves talking, via voice, to annoying bags of meat over analog radio.
We are very, very, very far from automated ATC. We can't even get automatic TRAINS to work reliably and thats a far simpler problem.
Trusting the safety of a flight to the reliability of an ipad is a ludicrously bad idea. Lots of pilots fly with ipads as a tool and they're generally pretty good, but they're nowhere near up to aviation standards of reliability and banking the whole safety of the flight on the reliability of a consumer good seems unwise. Ask any private pilot who's flown on a hot sunny day with an overheating ipad how good the idea sounds.
Edit: More automation is certainly an idea that ATC should continue to pursue, and there has been progress already. But the idea that total automation is possible much less easy ignores a lot of the complexity and reality of how air traffic actually works.
Completely different things. Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead. Comparing their risk is a complete apples and oranges situation.
Than again, ATC needs to deal with people talking on the radio, so the current system has a really long way to go to be completely automated.
> Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead.
It's funny to read all of these confident comments claiming ATC is easily automated from people who obviously don't understand what ATC entails.
ATC isn't just planning and scheduling. There is a lot of quick thinking and communication with pilots. You might only be thinking of the everything-goes-perfectly-right case, but the real value of having trained ATC operators is handling all of the edge cases and making quick decisions under high pressure scenarios that may not have even been represented in the training set.
ATC is also partially a visual job. Did you ever notice that there's literally a tower at the airport for air traffic control people? The people in this tower will manage things like traffic on the ground and immediate airspace around the tower. Visual inputs and critical thinking skills are very necessary.
There are a lot of assumptions that people outside of aviation make - it reminds me of that “falsehoods programmers believe about dates and time” article that gets passed around from time to time. Off the top of my head, some easily believable falsehoods:
1. The system knows where every plane is going
2. Every plane is talking to ATC
3. Every plane that is currently taking to ATC will be reachable a minute from now
4. If you issue a plane an instruction, it will follow it
5. The planes want to go the most direct route to the destination (winds aloft can often mean direct is slower and more expensive than a more circuitous route)
6. If a plane has an emergency, they will declare an emergency.
7. Planes that are not currently talking to ATC will not fly into the regions where they are supposed to be talking to ATC
8. Planes that are not talking to ATC will not just show up and land at the airport. This happens for a variety of reasons.
9. All planes have working transponders
10. All planes are traveling from one airport and landing (once) at another.
It feels like a tractable problem from the outside, but the variety of issues ATC solves every day is staggering.
11. Planes have radios that can select all ten digits.
Someone's radio broke where they couldn't enter '2' into it, so we had to find frequencies along their path that they could use and where ATC could relay.
You are thinking about automating the existing system, but the current system is entirely defined by the constraint that it must be operated by humans on radios. When this constraint can be removed so are its specific edge cases. When your phone communicates with the cell tower a frequency also must be assigned, and no buttons have to be pressed to do it.
Opposing Bases a few weeks ago had feedback from someone who had a button on their transponder that didn’t work and needed a code without any 5’s in it. Good luck getting _that_ through to auto-ATC.
Can emit all bytes except for 00000101 isn't really the type of problem you see in a digital system. And even if it were, it's pretty simple.
plane 1 > assign code 4563
plane 2 > reject
plane 1 > assign code 0827
plane 2 > accept
Also assigning short codes like that isn't something likely to be necessary in an automated protocol like this. Why not just have every message sent between 2 planes include a sender_id: UUID header?
Because now we’re talking about putting deeply integrated equipment in every plane. It’s a certification and cost nightmare.
This is not a system where you get to do clean slate greenfield development. Whatever you do must work for the lowest common denominator. ATC is a fairly cheap societal expense compared to developing, certifying, installing, and maintaining systems with the level of integration you want in hundreds of thousands of diverse planes.
The US has about 200,000 general aviation planes. You can’t ignore them, and you can’t just ban GA because that’s your pipeline for getting commercial pilots.
Worth noting in your “if the system was automated”: There are aircraft permanently without electrical systems. There are aircraft temporarily without electrical systems.
This is no different than the current ATC system. A plane or tower can lose power too. It's not particularly hard for the software to detect a plane that isn't in communication with the rest of the swarm / not obeying commands, assign it highest priority and GTFO of its way. The key is to have the software running on all planes (which you can do with commercial aviation) rather than rely on a centralized system with a single point of failure.
> The key is to have the software running on all planes
Yeeeeah… we just went through the ADS-B mandate. It took a decade or more, cost pilots thousands and thousands of dollars, still doesn’t have 100% compliance, and does weird stuff sometimes. And this was orders of magnitude easier than any kind of two way system.
Respectfully, do you have any time in the front seat of an aircraft or a tower/TRACON position?
I have none. Did the engineers who developed autopilots start out as pilots? Did the people who invented email start out delivering mail for the post office? The point is that the new system doesn't have to look like the old system. Automating ATC isn't going to be the current ATC system, just done by computer. That makes about as much sense as designing driverless cars with a humanoid robot as driver.
> read all of these confident comments claiming ATC is easily automated
You responded to the wrong comment then. I did not say in any place it would be easy. Just that they're very different class of problems. Nether did I say it's only planning and scheduling. Even the vision part is very different than cars. (Static in known environment vs dynamic in entirely random one)
You're arguing against others or a straw man here.
Also remember that ATC is vital for emergency situations. "Your distress call is important to us, please continue screaming into the void and hopefully a miracle happens.
Should've phrased it way better, that's true. It's a very different kind of vision when you do environment mapping and distance measuring -vs- when you do object tracking from a static location. Yes you need vision processing, but at a much higher resolution (sky is huge, planes are small) and much lower complexity. (moving objects between frames are easier to track) My point is that it's not comparable to what the cars use as vision.
It's always hilarious to see ignorant developers on HN claiming that real world engineering problems are easy to solve based on zero actual knowledge or experience. This kind of comment is really peak HN.
An autopilot for airplanes is only "easy" until something goes wrong. For example, one failure mode for autopilots is that if the aircraft gets progressively more and more out of trim the autopilot will automatically compensate until it hits its design limit. Then it suddenly disengages, leaving the human pilots in manual control of a nearly uncontrollable aircraft. If you talk to an actual flight control engineer they can give you plenty more examples of why building a safe autopilot is quite hard.
Those comments are coming from people whose aviation "knowledge" was learned by playing Ace Combat on Xbox and watching Snakes on a Plane. Totally disconnected from reality.
That's a nice strawman you're creating there. In some airspace classes and flight regimes an aircraft has more variables, especially when you account for possible failures. If an aircraft has a mechanical failure it can't just pull over and stop.
There are about 46000 aircraft registered in the USA, plus more that sometimes fly in from foreign countries. Many aircraft were manufactured decades ago by companies that no longer exist so major upgrades aren't economically practical.
Airplane autopilot is more like the cruise control feature in your car, not a self-driving computer that does everything for the pilots while they sit back.
Car autopilot and airplane autopilot don't share much in common other than the word "autopilot"
Yes, and that's what the FAA NextGen program has been doing incrementally since 2003. There are probably ways to accelerate it but it seems like most of the "automate ATC advocates" are simply ignorant and haven't done their homework.
Airplane autopilots are basically just cruise control.
You still have a human in the loop double checking everything constantly and stepping in as soon as something isn’t routine (which is actually quite frequently).
On a side note, I will use this thread to air out my biggest pet peeve - air travel isn't in fact safer than car travel. Well, it is, per mile, but that's cheating because planes travel so fast. Obviously a 3 hour commercial flight is safer than 40 hours of driving. But cars are still safer per journey.
So, if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, your car ride wasn't actually more dangerous than your flight as the saying goes. The only road-based transportion more dangerous than a plane is the bicycle.
Commercial air travel has a passenger fatality on something like one in ten million flights [0], and less than that on newer aircraft.
Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. [1]
So maybe you are technically correct. Barely. And it has nothing to do with airplanes being fast — planes only need to go a few tens of miles per trip to be significantly safer than cars, and plane trips are a lot longer than that.
All I'm saying is: if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, the drive to the airport wasn't more dangerous than your flight on the plane.
This is intuitive and obvious and yet is somehow beaten out of us by "quick facts" that we accept blindly touting commercial aviation as some kind of miracle. It's still a miracle but not quite to the degree that people believe. Hurtling through the sky at 0.8 Mach in a metal tube will always be more dangerous than rolling down a highway in a metal cage at 70 mph.
None of the people who responded to me yet have refuted this.
> In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was .003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on US highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles.
Planes travel about 10x-20x faster than cars, but that’s still 0.06 vs 0.57. Seems like quite a difference. Which numbers are you using?
Is the purpose of travel to go from one place to another or to spend time?
If it’s to go from one place to another, referencing statistics to per-mile seems to make more sense and, to me, it’s in no way “cheating because planes travel so fast”.
But your choice of destination changes because air travel is available to you. You wouldn't go to a destination thousands of miles away, as often, if it weren't possible to fly there.
Ok, now how small can they make this window? How much is the fine compared to missing several launch windows? I envision a point on a graph where it is still profitable for SpaceX to launch and ignore the FAA should they collapse the launch window to 2 nights/month or thereabout. If the FAA is forced to continue maintaining US airspace with a skeleton crew, someone will absolutely try and get away with launching more than they should.
"One launch hoping to get off the ground before the order goes into effect is NASA's ESCAPADE mission to Mars. The Rocket Lab-built twin orbiters are scheduled to liftoff on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket at 2:45 p.m. EST (1945 GMT) on Nov. 9. The impending restrictions mean the ESCAPADE mission won't have a chance to reset for a second launch attempt if the Nov. 9 liftoff is scrubbed for some reason."
Don't forget that commercial launches may still have a government/science org as their customer in question.
From TFA: "One launch hoping to get off the ground before the order goes into effect is NASA's ESCAPADE mission to Mars. The Rocket Lab-built twin orbiters are scheduled to liftoff on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket at 2:45 p.m. EST (1945 GMT) on Nov. 9. The impending restrictions mean the ESCAPADE mission won't have a chance to reset for a second launch attempt if the Nov. 9 liftoff is scrubbed for some reason."
Those which are launching payloads outside of Earth orbit. However the launch windows for those tend to be wider and not rely on time of day so much. It's the rockets that need to hit a particular slot in Earth orbit that need to launch at an exact time of day.
There pretty much aren't any other kinds these days. The only noncommercial launcher currently flying is SLS, and "currently flying" is a bit of a stretch. The last launch was three years ago and the next one won't be until next year at the earliest.
If this were really about safety it would be all rockets, not just commercial. It's not like saying "nobody fly in this area at this time" is actually difficult.
The actual order is here: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/FAA-Emergency-Order-11-6-25.pdf
Unfortunately, the article title is somewhat incomplete, as the restriction on commercial rocket launches is only for certain hours (for now, at least):
> Accordingly, with respect to commercial space launches and reentries, under the authority provided to the FAA Administrator by 49 U.S.C. §§ 40103, 40113, and 46105(c), and authority delegated to the FAA Administrator under 51 U.S.C. § 50909(a), it is hereby ordered that, beginning at 6:00 a.m. EST on November 10, 2025, and until this Order is cancelled, Commercial space launches and reentries will only be permitted between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. local time.
The article mentions the hours...
> Beginning 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT) on Nov. 10, commercial launches to space can only take place between the hours of 10 p.m. EST (0300 GMT) and 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT), according to the FAA order.
Right, hence "the article title is somewhat incomplete".
I just wanted to make that clear since not everyone reads the article before hopping into the comments and the title could be easily interpreted to prohibit all rocket launches.
LOCAL, not EST.
Oh, also:
1. When an FAA owned and operated facility does not have adequate staffing levels, ATC may elect not to provide the following services:
a. Radar Traffic Information Service;
b. Radar Assistance to visual flight rule (VFR) aircraft;
c. Terminal Radar Services for VFR aircraft;
d. VFR Traffic Pattern Operations;
e. Practice Approaches to VFR aircraft;
f. Flight checks services to restore inoperable equipment and approaches;
g. ATC services to parachute operations; or,
h. ATC services to certain special or unusual operations
The VFR stuff is always optional for ATC. VFR aircraft can request those things and ATC will usually accommodate, but it's workload dependent and ATC can and does decline, that's the whole tradeoff of flying under VFR rules. I'm less sure on the others, but I'm pretty sure they're all optional as well for ATC.
Now the difference might be that ATC will be more likely to deny these requests, which could be somewhat disruptive to flights that were expecting to be approved. But it should never be assumed so hopefully they have backup plans.
In any busy controlled airspace it has never been likely to get flight following, practice approaches, touch and go, etc, and as far as I know controllers have always been allowed to reply to all of these requests with “unable.”
Flight following has always been available (to me) as I believe they'd rather be talking to you than having you wandering around (completely legally) in VFR without communications. They've vectored me for other traffic, and done the same for me.
The others do directly increase workload and regularly get denied at busy airports (some outright "ban" training activity or charge so much as to make it impractical).
Given the current situation, cutting back on private aviation to allow our air traffic controllers, who are picking up second jobs, seems prudent.
Prudent, yes. But are all of those private aviation? Doesn't commercial civilian and military aviation include any VFR flights? Some of them also sound like emergency/rescue operations.
Nothing will actually stop those VFR flights from still happening, they'll just be less convenient/safe without certain ATC services. If those services are truly required, they can do IFR instead. So can private pilots just flying for fun for that matter, assuming the pilot has the right rating.
> commercial launches to space can only take place between the hours of 10 p.m. EST (0300 GMT) and 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT),
That's going to really piss off everyone around Ventura, CA (they get the sonic-boom when landing a booster on a barge for most launch trajectories from Vandenberg).
As someone who lives close enough to Vandenberg to watch launches from my front porch, this is going to really be disruptive. Squeezing all the launches into the overnight hours is going to be rough.
These orders, while written like they're orders, seem to be suggestions? They first ordered 20% flight reductions at major hubs, and 10% at minor hubs. Now the airlines have cancelled low single digit percentages. This is easily viewable at flightaware. https://www.flightaware.com/live/cancelled/today
The announcement say 4% Friday increase to 10% next week gradual ramp
Source: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/FAA-Emergency-Order-11-6-25.pdf
The order also only applies to domestic flights, so observed percentages on flightaware will be lower than those in the order.
I really want this to be the thing that pushes the industry into automated air traffic control.
It's not even technically difficult - we only allow error-prone humans to do the job because of inertia.
Build the system now, and then next time there is a government shutdown or shortage of air traffic controllers, we can say 'only planes equipped with an ipad with automatic air traffic control are allowed to fly'. Within 24h every plane in the nation will be equipped.
ATC is hundreds of functions and dozens of responsibilities like checking that the runway is safe to land. "Clear to land" is not just a turn of phrase, it is a check and verify that an aircraft with hundreds of people is relying on.
Air traffic is not a deterministic system, it is squishy and significantly more complicated because it involves humans, complex mechanical systems, and weather floating on top of a sea of limited resources.
Automating just the error prone radio calls would be a massive start.
Those could be sent as short text messages that appear on a screen in the cockpit, for the pilots to acknowledge receipt of with a limit set of responses, and would give ATC a lot more time to focus on their other duties.
So like texting and driving, but in the air? Flying is hard, I don’t think an automated text based system would be safer than what we have now.
Try responding to the strongest possible interpretation of what someone says.
Anyway, this wasn’t my idea, it came from one of the handful of active / recently retired commercial pilots on YouTube.
Automating various functions seems like a good idea. But it's not going to remove the humans from the loop in the event of a future government shutdown, which is what the original suggestion seemed to be.
This is already being done at many major airports through the FAA Data Comm program.
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/data-communications-data-comm-0
Thanks for linking that, I wasn’t aware it was that far in to development / production.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controller%E2%80%93pilot_data_...
Thanks, appreciate a good rabbit hole.
So leave the stuff that it suitable for humans to humans and automate everything else.
The general experience from the last 50 years is that reducing the human capacity for error by automation was mostly helpful in air traffic safety.
At the very least, safety mechanisms such as TCAS should be introduced where possible [1], to act as a protection of last resort when humans fail.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...
In some ways, they started in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Transporta...
There are a ton of details on the page that go into why it is so hard. One reason is that there are a lot of fundamental things to build and deploy before anything can be automated. E.g. before ADS-B (equipment on planes that detects its own location with GPS and automatically broadcasts it), ATC needed to talk to pilots and ask them where they were in a lot of cases. ADS-B has only been required on commercial flights since 2020.
Then it also suffers like every large government software project where a bunch of $100+ million contracts get paid out to private companies while nothing gets built. And it's part of annual appropriations, so funding was unpredictable. It's like working at a software company that had a major layoff or hiring spree every year for the last 20 years. If we could figure out how to run major project, the value to humanity would be enormous.
This is a ludicrously short sighted post. Do you know what ATC actually involves? It involves talking, via voice, to annoying bags of meat over analog radio.
We are very, very, very far from automated ATC. We can't even get automatic TRAINS to work reliably and thats a far simpler problem.
Copenhagen has an automated metro system.
way easier to automate than coordinating airplanes
Yes, but I was responding to this: "We can't even get automatic TRAINS to work reliably"
Trusting the safety of a flight to the reliability of an ipad is a ludicrously bad idea. Lots of pilots fly with ipads as a tool and they're generally pretty good, but they're nowhere near up to aviation standards of reliability and banking the whole safety of the flight on the reliability of a consumer good seems unwise. Ask any private pilot who's flown on a hot sunny day with an overheating ipad how good the idea sounds.
Edit: More automation is certainly an idea that ATC should continue to pursue, and there has been progress already. But the idea that total automation is possible much less easy ignores a lot of the complexity and reality of how air traffic actually works.
More automation while keeping trained professionals in the loop is definitely going to help with safety.
But the money comes from ... ?
[dead]
We can’t trust general use self driving cars yet. Air traffic control is a bit riskier than that
Completely different things. Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead. Comparing their risk is a complete apples and oranges situation.
Than again, ATC needs to deal with people talking on the radio, so the current system has a really long way to go to be completely automated.
> Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead.
It's funny to read all of these confident comments claiming ATC is easily automated from people who obviously don't understand what ATC entails.
ATC isn't just planning and scheduling. There is a lot of quick thinking and communication with pilots. You might only be thinking of the everything-goes-perfectly-right case, but the real value of having trained ATC operators is handling all of the edge cases and making quick decisions under high pressure scenarios that may not have even been represented in the training set.
ATC is also partially a visual job. Did you ever notice that there's literally a tower at the airport for air traffic control people? The people in this tower will manage things like traffic on the ground and immediate airspace around the tower. Visual inputs and critical thinking skills are very necessary.
There are a lot of assumptions that people outside of aviation make - it reminds me of that “falsehoods programmers believe about dates and time” article that gets passed around from time to time. Off the top of my head, some easily believable falsehoods:
1. The system knows where every plane is going
2. Every plane is talking to ATC
3. Every plane that is currently taking to ATC will be reachable a minute from now
4. If you issue a plane an instruction, it will follow it
5. The planes want to go the most direct route to the destination (winds aloft can often mean direct is slower and more expensive than a more circuitous route)
6. If a plane has an emergency, they will declare an emergency.
7. Planes that are not currently talking to ATC will not fly into the regions where they are supposed to be talking to ATC
8. Planes that are not talking to ATC will not just show up and land at the airport. This happens for a variety of reasons.
9. All planes have working transponders
10. All planes are traveling from one airport and landing (once) at another.
It feels like a tractable problem from the outside, but the variety of issues ATC solves every day is staggering.
ATC here. One of my favorites is:
11. Planes have radios that can select all ten digits.
Someone's radio broke where they couldn't enter '2' into it, so we had to find frequencies along their path that they could use and where ATC could relay.
You are thinking about automating the existing system, but the current system is entirely defined by the constraint that it must be operated by humans on radios. When this constraint can be removed so are its specific edge cases. When your phone communicates with the cell tower a frequency also must be assigned, and no buttons have to be pressed to do it.
Opposing Bases a few weeks ago had feedback from someone who had a button on their transponder that didn’t work and needed a code without any 5’s in it. Good luck getting _that_ through to auto-ATC.
Can emit all bytes except for 00000101 isn't really the type of problem you see in a digital system. And even if it were, it's pretty simple.
plane 1 > assign code 4563
plane 2 > reject
plane 1 > assign code 0827
plane 2 > accept
Also assigning short codes like that isn't something likely to be necessary in an automated protocol like this. Why not just have every message sent between 2 planes include a sender_id: UUID header?
Because now we’re talking about putting deeply integrated equipment in every plane. It’s a certification and cost nightmare.
This is not a system where you get to do clean slate greenfield development. Whatever you do must work for the lowest common denominator. ATC is a fairly cheap societal expense compared to developing, certifying, installing, and maintaining systems with the level of integration you want in hundreds of thousands of diverse planes.
There are only 35,000 commercial planes on Earth. Even if installing costs $1 million per plane, that's only $35 billion.
The US has about 200,000 general aviation planes. You can’t ignore them, and you can’t just ban GA because that’s your pipeline for getting commercial pilots.
But a lot of these assumptions that are now incorrect could easily be made true if the system was automated.
Worth noting in your “if the system was automated”: There are aircraft permanently without electrical systems. There are aircraft temporarily without electrical systems.
This is no different than the current ATC system. A plane or tower can lose power too. It's not particularly hard for the software to detect a plane that isn't in communication with the rest of the swarm / not obeying commands, assign it highest priority and GTFO of its way. The key is to have the software running on all planes (which you can do with commercial aviation) rather than rely on a centralized system with a single point of failure.
> The key is to have the software running on all planes
Yeeeeah… we just went through the ADS-B mandate. It took a decade or more, cost pilots thousands and thousands of dollars, still doesn’t have 100% compliance, and does weird stuff sometimes. And this was orders of magnitude easier than any kind of two way system.
Respectfully, do you have any time in the front seat of an aircraft or a tower/TRACON position?
I have none. Did the engineers who developed autopilots start out as pilots? Did the people who invented email start out delivering mail for the post office? The point is that the new system doesn't have to look like the old system. Automating ATC isn't going to be the current ATC system, just done by computer. That makes about as much sense as designing driverless cars with a humanoid robot as driver.
nevermind misread it.
> read all of these confident comments claiming ATC is easily automated
You responded to the wrong comment then. I did not say in any place it would be easy. Just that they're very different class of problems. Nether did I say it's only planning and scheduling. Even the vision part is very different than cars. (Static in known environment vs dynamic in entirely random one)
You're arguing against others or a straw man here.
Air traffic also requires the use of visual skills - and it’s harder than driving because of the small target size and wide field of view.
“See and avoid” has a very high priority in the cockpit - not everything out there is on radar, not everything on radar is under ATC control.
Also remember that ATC is vital for emergency situations. "Your distress call is important to us, please continue screaming into the void and hopefully a miracle happens.
> Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision
Doesn't ATC also need to actually deal with vision?
Should've phrased it way better, that's true. It's a very different kind of vision when you do environment mapping and distance measuring -vs- when you do object tracking from a static location. Yes you need vision processing, but at a much higher resolution (sky is huge, planes are small) and much lower complexity. (moving objects between frames are easier to track) My point is that it's not comparable to what the cars use as vision.
We've known how to do identification and known object tracking for decades (for example https://www.academia.edu/122937237/Computer_vision_system_fo...)
There’s a lot of automation that can be done to reduce the workload of controllers.
Making an autopilot for airplanes is significantly easier than cars.
It's always hilarious to see ignorant developers on HN claiming that real world engineering problems are easy to solve based on zero actual knowledge or experience. This kind of comment is really peak HN.
An autopilot for airplanes is only "easy" until something goes wrong. For example, one failure mode for autopilots is that if the aircraft gets progressively more and more out of trim the autopilot will automatically compensate until it hits its design limit. Then it suddenly disengages, leaving the human pilots in manual control of a nearly uncontrollable aircraft. If you talk to an actual flight control engineer they can give you plenty more examples of why building a safe autopilot is quite hard.
And yet it was done decades ago. Air traffic control is just as solvable.
"Done" in what sense? Do you even understand how autopilots work and how limited they are?
That’s a nice strawman you’re creating there.
An aircraft has fewer and simpler variables to deal with than ground vehicle.
If a ground vehicle runs a red light, it’s potentially fatal error. There are more of these for a car than there are for an airplane.
You don’t have to write automation to avoid hitting trees in a plane. An airplane just needs terrain data and a few algorithms.
There are a few enough airplanes and airplane manufacturers that you could regulate a specific algorithm for traffic avoidance.
> There are more of these for a car than there are for an airplane.
Half of this comment section has strangely simplified ideas of how airplanes work and how a flight might get into trouble.
It's crazy that so many comments are convinced that completely automating airplane flight is some relatively trivial problem.
Those comments are coming from people whose aviation "knowledge" was learned by playing Ace Combat on Xbox and watching Snakes on a Plane. Totally disconnected from reality.
That's a nice strawman you're creating there. In some airspace classes and flight regimes an aircraft has more variables, especially when you account for possible failures. If an aircraft has a mechanical failure it can't just pull over and stop.
There are about 46000 aircraft registered in the USA, plus more that sometimes fly in from foreign countries. Many aircraft were manufactured decades ago by companies that no longer exist so major upgrades aren't economically practical.
So why did we have airplane autopilots decades before car autopilots if it's not easier?
"Easier" != "easy"
This is such a strange comment section.
Airplane autopilot is more like the cruise control feature in your car, not a self-driving computer that does everything for the pilots while they sit back.
Car autopilot and airplane autopilot don't share much in common other than the word "autopilot"
Modern auto pilot and flight management computer combos can fly way-points and perform full Cat III auto lands.
I’m not suggesting the pilots are sitting there doing fuck-all, or that they are not necessarily.
I think what the automate ATC advocates are suggesting is to bring ATC in to the 21st century.
Yes, and that's what the FAA NextGen program has been doing incrementally since 2003. There are probably ways to accelerate it but it seems like most of the "automate ATC advocates" are simply ignorant and haven't done their homework.
https://www.faa.gov/nextgen
Thanks for that link too. I wasn’t aware of the extent to which all those is already underway.
My knowledge is mostly limited to a casual watching of the aviation YouTube boffins.
Airplane autopilots are basically just cruise control.
You still have a human in the loop double checking everything constantly and stepping in as soon as something isn’t routine (which is actually quite frequently).
But the stakes are much higher.
On a side note, I will use this thread to air out my biggest pet peeve - air travel isn't in fact safer than car travel. Well, it is, per mile, but that's cheating because planes travel so fast. Obviously a 3 hour commercial flight is safer than 40 hours of driving. But cars are still safer per journey.
So, if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, your car ride wasn't actually more dangerous than your flight as the saying goes. The only road-based transportion more dangerous than a plane is the bicycle.
Commercial air travel has a passenger fatality on something like one in ten million flights [0], and less than that on newer aircraft.
Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. [1]
So maybe you are technically correct. Barely. And it has nothing to do with airplanes being fast — planes only need to go a few tens of miles per trip to be significantly safer than cars, and plane trips are a lot longer than that.
[0] https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm
[1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
All I'm saying is: if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, the drive to the airport wasn't more dangerous than your flight on the plane.
This is intuitive and obvious and yet is somehow beaten out of us by "quick facts" that we accept blindly touting commercial aviation as some kind of miracle. It's still a miracle but not quite to the degree that people believe. Hurtling through the sky at 0.8 Mach in a metal tube will always be more dangerous than rolling down a highway in a metal cage at 70 mph.
None of the people who responded to me yet have refuted this.
> Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles.
Which is vanishingly small.
It means the average driver can expect to be a fatality in an automobile accident once ever one to two hundred years or more.
If you drive a fairly typical 12.5K miles per year, it will take you 8000 years to drive 100M miles.
“Or more” technically includes a factor of 20-80x, but I think you were way low.
Thanks. Sloppy work.
I’m half an Australia away from my usual internet-rant tooling, and I find multi-tab cross referencing on mobile pretty unenjoyable.
From https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/
> In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was .003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on US highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles.
Planes travel about 10x-20x faster than cars, but that’s still 0.06 vs 0.57. Seems like quite a difference. Which numbers are you using?
Is the purpose of travel to go from one place to another or to spend time?
If it’s to go from one place to another, referencing statistics to per-mile seems to make more sense and, to me, it’s in no way “cheating because planes travel so fast”.
But your choice of destination changes because air travel is available to you. You wouldn't go to a destination thousands of miles away, as often, if it weren't possible to fly there.
Speak for yourself. I ride in Waymos frequently.
I thought they were currently addressing any risks by restricting air traffic?
Ok, now how small can they make this window? How much is the fine compared to missing several launch windows? I envision a point on a graph where it is still profitable for SpaceX to launch and ignore the FAA should they collapse the launch window to 2 nights/month or thereabout. If the FAA is forced to continue maintaining US airspace with a skeleton crew, someone will absolutely try and get away with launching more than they should.
Officially no reason to ever visit Florida now
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Which commercial rocket launches care about planetary alignments?
It's right in the article:
"One launch hoping to get off the ground before the order goes into effect is NASA's ESCAPADE mission to Mars. The Rocket Lab-built twin orbiters are scheduled to liftoff on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket at 2:45 p.m. EST (1945 GMT) on Nov. 9. The impending restrictions mean the ESCAPADE mission won't have a chance to reset for a second launch attempt if the Nov. 9 liftoff is scrubbed for some reason."
Don't forget that commercial launches may still have a government/science org as their customer in question.
From TFA: "One launch hoping to get off the ground before the order goes into effect is NASA's ESCAPADE mission to Mars. The Rocket Lab-built twin orbiters are scheduled to liftoff on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket at 2:45 p.m. EST (1945 GMT) on Nov. 9. The impending restrictions mean the ESCAPADE mission won't have a chance to reset for a second launch attempt if the Nov. 9 liftoff is scrubbed for some reason."
So it sounds like Blue Origin would be concerned
Those which are launching payloads outside of Earth orbit. However the launch windows for those tend to be wider and not rely on time of day so much. It's the rockets that need to hit a particular slot in Earth orbit that need to launch at an exact time of day.
Most (all?) NASA spacecraft fly on commercial launches these days.
There pretty much aren't any other kinds these days. The only noncommercial launcher currently flying is SLS, and "currently flying" is a bit of a stretch. The last launch was three years ago and the next one won't be until next year at the earliest.
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There is no need for namecalling. This is HN. Please be respectful of your fellow commenters, even if you think they're being a walnut.
You’re right. But the correct response is to flag, not comment.
(I’m commenting because I love the insult and already know I am going to call everyone I love or respect a walnut for a few weeks.)
> But the corrext response is to flag, not comment.
Oh? Apologies then. Either I did not realize or I didn't remember. Either way, I'll try my best to remember in the future! Thanks!
Also, yes, I love the insult too when used in a friendly way.
> Oh? Apologies then
None owed. You walnut :)
Haha ;D
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Many ketamine addicts feel better than me. If I took it personally, I'd be dead.
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If this were really about safety it would be all rockets, not just commercial. It's not like saying "nobody fly in this area at this time" is actually difficult.
Which non-commercial rockets are launching these days? Isn't pretty much everything public outsourced to commercial operators?
SLS, minuteman, I'm sure there are others
In most years we have about 3 LGM‑30 Minuteman launches and 0 SLS launches. This will not be a problem.