Obviously it will take some time for the full accident analysis but there have been quite a few near misses lately due to air traffic controller errors. Flight volume has been growing, airspace near airports is more congested, and controllers are overworked. Eventually all of the "Swiss cheese" holes line up. We're going to need to hire more controllers.
Also, it appears that one of the aircraft was a military (not police) H-60 Blackhawk helicopter.
Hiring controllers is not easy. A friend's daughter just went through the hiring process. She graduated from college with an appropriate degree right as COVID hit. Her FAA application wasn't accepted for four years.
This past summer she did the four-week interactive online courses. Applicants must pass this and may not re-enter the program if they do not. After that she did the six-week courses in Oklahoma City. Again, applicants must pass this and may not re-enter the program if they do not. She passed. Only half her class of 20 passed. In the prior class, only 4 of 15 passed.
She declined the position when they could not offer a position within reasonable proximity of her family. She, too, may not re-enter the program. On top of all that, the program has strict age requirements because there's a mandatory retirement age (55, I believe).
There isn't a large pool of applicants and the percentage of successful ones is not high. Considering the amount of lives on the line, it's understandable the hiring criteria is strict. All told, it's not an easy position to fill and even explicit efforts to increase the number of applicants will take years. Just like many other skilled fields.
That's shocking and disturbing, and is pretty much a textbook example of exactly the type of thing opponents to DEI have been referring to for how DEI and Affirmative Action result in a lowering of the bar. They explicitly structured things so that ATC hiring was pre-restricted for non-cognitive (e.g. merit) reasons, and failed out candidates that scored a perfect score on the cognitive test on the basis of their demographics (they weren't minorities).
ATC (as well as most government jobs) are a real case of "you get what you pay for". When you bring wages down so low that educated engineers don't want to work your job, your options are to lower the qualifications or leave empty seats.
DEI might have contributed to this, but we wouldn't be hiring unqualified people in the first place if America could naturally compete for talent. The lesson learned seems to be less about the dangers of diversity and more about how the feds aren't paying the industry rate for professionals.
Educated engineers generally don't want to work ATC jobs regardless of pay because they're not engineering jobs. Controllers are operators, not engineers. There are some working controllers with engineering degrees, but almost nothing in typical engineering coursework is directly relevant to the job.
Did you read the link that I replied to? Because in that link, what I am responding to, it EXPLICITLY says that the FAA changed the ATC selection process to exclude candidates based on demographics (being not diverse) regardless of their aptitude as tested using a standardized and validated cognitive assessment. These were candidates who had already completed multiple years of schooling and explicitly wanted to be ATCs, so you are talking about a pipeline problem which may or may not exist but is irrelevant to the article I am responding to in the link above my comment.
Per that article, candidates who accepted the pay terms and wanted to become ATCs were /rejected/ explicitly because they were not minorities or otherwise able to produce a biographical or demographic reason for acceptance, even when they scored a perfect score on the standardized aptitude assessment.
If you have something to refute the article the person above me linked, I'd love to see it because I'm incredibly disappointed in what I read about in that article.
No, you read a link that says people suing the FAA claim the FAA didn't hire qualified candidates on diversity.
Except that none of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit actually bothered to apply for jobs with the FAA (see this blog post from their own legal team crowing about winning a procedural matter over whether they had standing to sue given that they never applied for a job and thus were never actually rejected by the FAA https://mslegal.org/press-releases/mslf-prevails-over-faas-a... )...
What actually happened was that the FAA invalidated a bunch of AT-SAT[1] scores to align with its new diversity policy, and a bunch of people who barely passed the first time didn't want to re-take the test again and risk failing. So they did the American thing and sued instead.
The FAA has not rejected qualified candidates on the grounds of "diversity." And at any rate, the controller in the DC tower last night was hired during the Trump administration and the Blackhawk pilot that caused the crash wasn't the kind of candidate who would have been selected on DEI grounds...
[1] it's like the SAT, but for controller jobs instead of college admissions
Perhaps I misunderstood something, but it seems those claims were supported by the evidence of multiple internal memos retrieved via discovery. Another commenter points out that this practice ended in 2018 due to Congress making it illegal, but prior that the FAA had been issuing a biographical assessment as a basis for hiring decisions, exactly as stated in the article.
Your own link has the court opinion confirming my understanding of the article. The fact they won the case on procedural grounds is not relevant to the fact the court is opining in the case that the evidence supports a conclusion that the FAA discriminated against "non-diverse" candidates who were otherwise qualified.
I think we can all agree that for a role like ATC, the most important thing is that candidates are competent and capable, because it is literally life or death. I have the strong belief that minority candidates are also competent and capable, so discriminatory against "non-diverse" candidates is reprehensible in the strongest terms. I don't think my position here is unusual, unreasonable, or in any way objectionable, and it turns out Congress agreed and made this practice explicitly illegal.
The fact they won the case on procedural grounds is not relevant
You're misreading both links. They didn't win the case, it's still going. They won a procedural issue that prevented them from automatically losing the case, and recast not losing as true victory. And the importance of my link was that it proves my point not yours: that the plaintiffs were not actually affected by the alleged FAA diversity hiring practices because...again...they never applied for a job in the first place.
Everybody railing against the assessment fundamentally misunderstood the test. There are no DEI questions. The test does not ask you what your ethnicity is, or your sex. It's basically just a personality test with biographical data: what is your preferred learning method? how do you respond to high-stress situations? what have you studied? what is your relevant flying/airport experience? how did you learn about the ATCS role?
The experience questions alone can get you a of a "passing" score (answers are not weighted equally, but despite popular claims online, all questions are worth at least some points...there are no purely informational questions https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/ATC%20Hiring%20R...). The OIG report also states the Biographical Assessment was tested on existing controllers to validate the scoring rubric and refined accordingly, meaning that nobody actually employed as an ATC could fail the BA. And importantly: the validation cohort was overwhelmingly white and male... (And the report also notes that in the 3 years that the BA was in use, there was no change in the ethnic or gender makeup of new ATCS hires.)
The plaintiff in the original post you linked supposedly got a 100% on the original test but somehow managed to "fail" a biography test in which more than half of the questions are about their experience in the field or relevant education. If they were being honest about their qualifications, they should have gotten a passing score with plenty of points to spare. Because again...the scoring rubric was validated by testing it on the existing staff of overwhelmingly white male employees...who all passed...
that isn't what the test questions were about at all:
The best source you can cite is a series of twitter posts that gets basic facts wrong, like the timeline and "test" contents?
The link claims the new "test" was implemented in 2014. It makes this claim repeatedly. But the BA was implemented in 2013 after years of being refined (including, as discussed by the OIG, by having current ATC staff take it). It was not intended to increase DEI-style diversity; Fox News ran a report in 2015 about a (tribal) Native American candidate who would have aced the BA if DEI-style diversity had been the goal. The original goal was to vastly expand the pool of candidates, because the FAA had a serious shortfall of candidates willing to work in all of the locations where ATCs were required and the hope was that they by bringing in more applicants, including so-called less qualified candidates, this would yield candidates willing to work at difficult-to-staff smaller airports where candidates wouldn't need to be as highly qualified to adequately perform the job.
The claim that the "correct" answers were leaked to the black ATC union (while true) is irrelevant. The "test" was a biographical questionnaire. The only way to cheat was to lie. And notably, members of the NBCFAE who supposedly had copies of the "correct" answers...didn't score any better than the people in the lawsuit suing over the test. Because again...the only way to cheat was to lie... (Unless those of you railing against the BA are suggesting that someone actually needs to be told that having more experience and expressing more enthusiasm about work is better than having less experience and not caring about your job?)
And one final important point: after Congress eliminated the BA in 2018, in 2019 Trump's FAA implemented the diversity hiring program he spent most of yesterday railing against.
Yep, that's right. The evil DEI program that Trump is mad about is his own program.
It says "In 2016, Congress passed Public Law 114-190, which among other things banned the use of biographical assessments as a first-line hiring tool for air traffic controllers."
> How much less of a shortage of ATCs would we have now if it wasn’t for that debacle?
Probably not much, considering the biggest constraining factor is pay. For example, San Carlos airport is shutting down ATC entirely because they can't pay anyone enough to live locally to the tower: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/bay-area-airport-losing-...
There would be no problem filling the seats if the compensation was handsome and attractive. But we all know how federal workers are compensated, even when lives are on the line.
I think a small airport/airfield in one of the most expensive areas of the country is a bit of an exceptional case. In most places ATC employees make pretty competitive/comfortable wages, so I’m not sure this is the only factor.
Agreed. Imagine if tech hiring worked like that. Entry-level positions could be moved to WV or the Dakotas, optimize for low salary and cost-of-living and ignore retention/burnout/washout rates since you figure they're going to be high anyway.
FYI the states(/districts) with lowest ATC pay are DC, IA, MS, MT, SD, VT, WV :
See third plot: "Annual mean wage for air traffic controllers, by state, May 2023" and lots of other useful stats in https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes532021.htm
Isn't it a reasonable filter? I'd (naively) assume that all things being equal, a person who passes a test on the first attempt, is more likely to have a higher innate ability than one who doesn't.
That depends on the test, and the training surrounding it.
If I'm hiring for a job where there's a strict requirement to be 6 feet tall and there's nothing candidates can do to get taller - then once you've measured under 6 feet there's no point in re-testing you.
If I'm hiring for a job where there's a strict requirement that you be able to lift a 90 lbs weight, a lot of people will fail - but if they hit the gym, in a month or two they'll be able to pass easily.
If I'm hiring for a job where there's a strict requirement that you be able to lift a 90 lbs weight, but before the test every applicant goes through a 6 month strength training program, so we test them at absolute peak strength? Re-testing would be a waste of time, except in a few cases like if someone had a loved one die just before the final test.
If I'm hiring for a job with a written test, the test draws a random selection of questions from a question bank, and some questions are much easier than others? There might be a substantial random element to the results. If re-testing people produces substantially different scores, probably that indicates I need to improve the design of my test.
People's performance varies from day to day, and if doing the test just once, then some people will pass it because of good luck shape that day, although another day they would have failed.
When constantly predictable high performance is important, it makes sense to do the test on a bunch of different occasions, and look at the overall result (like, lowest, median and average scores). And it'd be ok to do a bit worse on one occasion, as long as you were always above the minimum.
Rather than in effect randomly picking just one test result.
Looking at the results from many tests, reduces false negatives, but also false positives.
(And of course if studying and practice matters, getting to re-take the test some years later: yes of course, but possibly the test should then be a little bit longer.)
They get multiple chances to "retry" in the FAA academy. It isn't one pass/fail test; they practice a lot and take multiple tests. They can fail the first few tests as long as they average out to a 70% or greater.
This is, justifiably, very similar to nuclear reactor operators. Pay needs to reflect the working conditions to attract more people (it does for reactor operators).
No college degree is officially required. Candidates with aviation related degrees probably have a better chance of making it through. But there are plenty of working controllers who have only a high school diploma or learned the job as enlisted military personnel.
"Have either one year of general work experience or four years of education leading to a bachelor’s degree, or a combination of both"
In her case it was a Bachelors in Aviation and Aerospace Science with an Air Traffic Control Concentration. There may be other programs or concentrations which are acceptable.
Since the chances of landing an ATC job are so slim with the degree, what kind of job options does that degree afford you? What kind of job did she end up taking (or doing while waiting on the FAA)?
While waiting for the FAA and since declining the ATC position she's worked at her family's auto repair shop. Pre-FAA she did repair work and for the last few months since returning she's more on the management side. She hasn't yet decided if the family business or something else is the career she wants.
There is a law that the govt has to negotiate in good faith. Presumably while they could say "no" to everything, it would be hard to prove that was "good faith" if the union takes them to court.
In the US, most public-sector unions incl. transport workers are essentially not allowed strike under the Railway Labor Act unless they have exhausted all mandatory federal negotiation/ mediation (nominally on the grounds that it could cripple the economy).
This was also an issue in the 2022 US freight rail labor dispute where Biden, Pelosi and Congress passed a law to criminalize the prospect of rail strike. [0][1]
If the freight staffing level cuts had been reversed, it's quite likely the 2/2023
East Palestine, OH train derailment and $$bn environmental disaster [2] would have been avoided. The freight companies, in the name of efficiency and slashing staffing levels, had combined multiple trains into one huge one (which has a higher risk of derailing, and larger size of derailment.)
To your question, it would be good if the US had a nonpartisan setup for balancing profit and efficiency vs safety and conditions, but that's not the case. Since the time of Reagan and the 1981 PATCO strike. Curious if there's any objective comparison between China and US how freight rail is operated. But then the Chinese freight rail is state-owned which largely removes the profit incentive for cutting safety. Compared to the US, China has almost no freight rail disasters, and it has more freight traffic.
A friend of mine found out he is color blind that way. Not the most common one which you can detect by the tests which are in every biology book here but a rarer variant which is immediately disqualifying. He had to go through weeks of testing as well if that was not the case. Though here you'd be place within 300km of your home so less issues of closeness to family.
Practically all laws, rules, and regulations in aviation were written with the blood of those who, well, sadly had to embrace the Earth so to speak.
On the face of it they may look discriminatory, especially the age restrictions, but the FAA will be more than happy to cite objective and scientific evidence supporting them which were, again, written in blood.
Maybe. The article talks about "how the Obama-era FAA practiced discrimination in its hiring processes," which wouldn't apply to the woman I know. But it's not an in-depth article so it is possible such practices were still in place through Trump's first term and post-COVID when FAA hiring ramped up and would have affected the person I know.
> In addition, the White House has put a hiring freeze in place, prohibiting the replacement of open government positions or the creation of new ones while the administration evaluates reductions in the workforce. The White House plans to release a memorandum with further guidance within 90 days. This has drawn criticism from lawmakers as the FAA has been ramping up controller hiring.
"The FAA has awarded a new contract for air traffic services at SQL to Robinson Aviation (RVA). However, the contract does not include locality pay to account for the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a result, RVA’s employment offers to current SQL controllers were significantly lower than their current compensation under SERCO. Understandably, all current controllers have declined RVA’s offers."
"Given that the FAA is ultimately responsible for ensuring air traffic services at SQL, we requested temporary FAA staffing for the tower—a solution currently being implemented at Eagle Airport in Colorado during its transition from SERCO to RVA. However, the FAA informed us this morning that they will not provide temporary personnel for SQL"
I've been working towards my private pilot license at San Carlos and I don't know what's going to happen if they can't find someone to do this job. The airport can get very busy sometimes and it seems like it could be dangerous to have nobody working the tower.
I sympathize with the ATC workers though. It's ridiculous that they can't pay them a decent wage for the area, there's only two of them as far as I know.
The SQL tower service provided by SERCO already had a poor recent reputation among Bay Area small aircraft pilots, with controller(s) who are obviously overworked/underpaid. You can find plenty of threads about it on forums and on YouTube.
Now they want to go with an even bottomer-of-the-barrel contractor? That's not going to work at all.
Doesn't that just mean there will be no taxi control? My understanding is that ATC isn't in the tower. The tower staff just give clearances for take-off and directions on which runway to land/take-off. In radio clips, you can hear ATC hand-off a plane to tower.
No, ATC here refers to ground and tower controllers. They give taxi, takeoff, landing, and close in maneuvering instructions.
When you say ATC I believe you’re thinking of tracon controllers, a level of airspace up from towers who control approach and departures and then hand you off to/from the tower. Above them there’s yet another level, center controllers. All of these are ATC though.
The "ground" controller manages taxing around the "movement areas" (i.e. taxiways) on the ground. This notably does not include the runways. And it depends how much of the actual ramp and parking area they control (those are sometimes non-movement area and it's the pilots job to not hit anything).
The "tower" controller manages the actual runways, and the airspace within several miles of the airport laterally and a few thousand feet vertically (varying at each airport). This includes sequencing all the planes that want to take off of land there, and everybody maneuvering around that immediate area.
For the large airports that mostly big airliner flights, that sequencing is largely worked out by the approach controllers dozens or hundreds of miles ahead of time. So there's a steady stream of planes following standardized approach procedures at just the right distance apart.
Outside of the ~30 busiest airports in the country though, there is also a lot of general aviation in small planes. They want to transition through that airspace, or do a dozen laps around the "pattern" to practice landings, etc. Even at fairly major airports, there's plenty of GA activity. For example at Burbank, Ontario, John Wayne, Long Beach, San Jose, Oakland, etc in California. It's only really SFO and LAX where that doesn't really happen, because they set fees to shoo the peons away.
SQL is a small but very busy airport that is almost exclusively GA. There are several flight schools there with multiple planes each, and it's sandwiched in complicated airspace between SFO, SJC, OAK, and open bay.
The tower at this kind of airport is doing a delicate dance keeping multiple planes buzzing around in a rectangular pattern all day every day. Some of which are faster than others. Less frequently a larger much faster plane wants to get in or out and they're getting handed off from approach. Helicopters are doing tours and wanting to cross through. And a lot of the people flying are students that are new at this, don't know how to talk or listen on the radio right yet, make mistakes following directions, etc.
With the tower closed, all those people have to coordinate on a party-line radio with each other about where they are, what they're doing, etc to hopefully not hit anyone. So yeah... it's possible, but it's going to be a mess, and that's why tiny airports like this with virtually no commercial passenger service have a tower.
Also if you're leaving the immediate area, someone at the airport (ground, tower, or "clearance delivery", depending) normally will coordinate putting your destination (for visual/VFR flight following) or full route (for IFR/instruemnt) into the ATC systems before you takeoff so that you can talk to the approach controllers once you leave and they can provide you traffic advisories, etc.
With nobody at the tower to do that, you have to "cold call" approach once already airborne. Or if your route allows, just not get flight following at all (and then ATC has no way to reach you). So SQL tower closing will also add to the workload for the SFO/OAK approach area.
Honest question: are air traffic controllers at risk for being replaced with AI systems? My initial thought is no, there is too much complexity, but AI could help ease the load. I'm not really informed about air traffic systems, just curious.
Tower systems are the last place in the world you would want a 97% accurate large language model, and the very last place we would culturally tolerate this sort of thing. Innate conservatism is what happens when deviations from perfection lead to collisions, and for the most part "AI" success remains a stochastic matter, gigabyte to terabyte sized tensors that are not human-intelligible. A black box which cannot be readily, safely validated in the real world.
With that said - algorithmic, automated, and digital systems for collision avoidance at the very minimum have and could continue to make ATC jobs significantly easier. The radio voice channel is a particularly low fidelity, low bandwidth way to mete out information and directives.
There will be a list of scenarios competing for that "last place".
Operating rooms, certain military/police situations and self driving cars come to mind. A shared characteristic here is that errors lead to fatal outcomes exacerbated by unclear accountability.
Yes, but, as with collision avoidance systems... Years ago a VA thoracic surgeon was trying to find someone to build them a tool to listen in an OR for surgeon commands and team member acks, and if it saw a command without an ack, to nudge. Context is surgeons are both team managers and individual specialists, and when heads down as specialist, the managerial role gets load shed. So a dropped command may not be caught before bad things happen. The VA does OR pickup teams, so there isn't the polished but idiosyncratic load sharing of long-standing teams. And the acks are more formal. He was fine with a high false negative rate (catching anything is good), and a moderate false positive (nudges are low cost). That seems now plausible. Aside from tech maturity, the biggest challenge then envisioned was willingness to be recorded. Though perhaps the real fix is staffing the team management role, but that was above his pay grade.
The speculation on pilot Youtube is that the helicopter in this incident observed a light in the sky, one of several in the closely spaced train of landing jets on approach to National Airport.
The helicopter pilot asked multiple times for permission to assume liability for visually avoiding the plane in the approach path, and the tower warned about the plane, and he confirmed he could see it. Several times, he insisted he had it in his sights, and it was not on a collision course, and requested and was granted permission to continue through the flight path on that basis. And he did successfully avoid that dot in the sky.
He was looking at the dot in the sky that was about 60 seconds behind the plane that he ultimately collided with.
If that is the case, there is certainly a chance that an automated warning signal from an automated tracking network (not "you're within five miles of another aircraft on the map, watch out" but "your current 3d trajectory is within ten seconds of collision with another aircraft") may have averted this. That isn't AI, it's just having the plane keep secondary track of ADS-B inside the cockpit. And it sounds from a cursory search like it's already standard for commercial planes to have an ADS-B receiver and a Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System (TCAS), just maybe not 1980's military helicopters.
No. We use some deterministic automation on the backend for helping with traffic management and rerouting flight paths, but the communication with aircraft is mostly done via voice. Everything happens too fast to insert a keyboard in the middle (*), and voice recognition would be too error prone for something safety critical.
(* CPDLC does allow ATC to send texts to/from larger aircraft, but this is only used for things that aren't time sensitive. Voice is still the primary method of control.)
It also has to listen, and accept complex requests and demands from pilots over a scratchy and occasionally garbled radio link.
Have you ever gotten frustrated because Alexa/Siri/etc completely misinterpreted a voice request? Or looked at the quality of YouTube subtitles? That’s still lots of inaccuracy with AI speech recognition. There’s no room for that up there.
And yes, the non-deterministic nature is a huge problem given this is the very definition of a life-critical system.
I know, but these things can be trained for. Siri/Alexa is 2010 tech, not 2025. And the big benefit is that there's a pretty limited vocabulary and phraseology in aviation.
I don't see ATC being replaced yet but in the future perhaps something more automated could happen including more visual instructions.
The SOTA is augmented ATC displays and digital towers, which basically use object recognition to label planes on cameras, and the controllers sit somewhere else.
Usually this is done for rural airports, where you have one controller potentially managing multiple low traffic airports, and it’s tough to get ATC willing to move to remote locations. The only busy airport doing this kind of thing is London City Airport, but that has 3M passengers a year and DCA has 25M. That was motivated by the lack of space at London City Airport, so they demolished the traditional tower to reallocate space.
Ages ago, I watched a documentary about ATC that showed a drill involving ATC work under power failure (mains and generator). I'm probably misremembering some details but there were battery-operated radios and little tablets being passed around with scribbled information.
I guess AI can work while the lights are on, but if this is your backstop scenario, you still need the meat ATC controllers, and they really need to know their stuff.
Why would it need to even be AI? Why not just regular software? Couldn't airplanes just send a message that they want to land and the Air Traffic Control software sees where they are and what other aircraft are around and sends everyone the appropriate messages?
The human ATC system is very good at handling exceptions, including various kinds of emergencies, pilot errors, and reasons to prioritize one plane over another. The human controllers also typically have a good understanding of the details of airspace, regulations, policies, aviation customs, and the capabilities of various kinds of aircraft.
So for example, a plane can have a "missed approach and go around" when trying to land. I was once on a plane that did that because of extremely high winds. In that case, the plane that was supposed to be on the ground is suddenly climbing again and is going to need to turn in order to repeat the approach.
A plane can have a medical emergency onboard, so it needs to land at an unexpected airport, possibly faster than a normal landing, or starting from a somewhat atypical position. I was once on a plane that did that because someone onboard had a seizure.
A plane can have damage or equipment failures that the pilots find it hard to assess directly, so it needs to fly around for a while to give the pilots time to "run checklists" or perform various tests, or sometimes to let a ground-based observer report on something about the plane (!), or just to develop their intuition about how functional the plane is. It might then need to land at an unintended airport or return unexpectedly to its takeoff airport. I was once on a plane that did that because of bird strikes during departure, where the plane was damaged but the pilots were unsure how seriously.
A pilot might misunderstand something or disobey regulations, and that pilot or another pilot might be told to take some unexpected evasive action to avoid a collision. (This is one area that has been productively automated in some cases via TCAS, where the aircraft themselves can sometimes figure out what an appropriate maneuver would be before a controller tells them one.) I haven't personally experienced that.
There might be another kind of emergency where a runway is closed and a large number of planes need to be diverted (like right after this collision where DCA was abruptly closed).
There might be negotiations with an uncooperative or mentally ill pilot (like the tragic story of Richard Russell in 2018, but also a number of incidents that had happier endings).
Pilots might also negotiate more cooperatively with ATC related to diversions and priority in situations like bad weather, where the airport has less capacity than originally expected and the pilots need to determine whether they will divert to a different airport. In this case the air traffic controllers may talk to different pilots about their fuel levels and other factors that make them better and worse candidates for changing flight plans. En-route (ARTCC/ACC) controllers will also negotiate with pilots about changing altitude to reduce or avoid turbulence.
There are occasionally cases where a pilot is incapacitated and someone with less training and experience needs to be advised remotely on how to land a plane. (This is mostly very small planes but ATC will still ultimately deal with these emergencies.) In that case other planes also need to be kept away from the incident aircraft and maybe diverted elsewhere.
Specifically for takeoff and landing, there are often multiple planes using the same runway (for takeoff, landing, or both) in relatively quick succession, or possibly using runways that cross each other. In this case, a controller needs to keep an eye on how quickly pilots have (or haven't) complied with specific clearances, e.g. to cross a runway on the ground, because the clearances may need to be revoked or modified if they aren't used quickly enough (because of the presence of other aircraft that have also received clearances that will soon start to conflict with the older clearances). This also includes checking whether planes that have landed have vacated the runway expeditiously (since if they haven't done so, for whatever reason, other planes may soon need to be told to go around).
There are also cases where military or law enforcement authorities may ask or demand to modify normal ATC procedures or clearances because of some special operation or problem. The simplest case is that they might ask to prioritize a government aircraft over civilian flights for some reason, or ask certain other operations to stop e.g. during a takeoff or landing of Air Force One. (I just watched this a few days ago with an Air Force One departure from Las Vegas, where other departures and landings were temporarily but briefly suspended. So that had to be planned and communicated to various pilots, some of whom then had follow-up questions about what they were or weren't allowed to do.)
Pilots are also considered to have ultimate responsibility for the safety of their flights and passengers, and they can also refuse some ATC instructions, or deviate from some normal procedures, in emergencies. So for example, a controller might believe it's safe to land in certain weather conditions and might give a pilot a certain clearance, but the pilot might not feel up to completing the landing and might then refuse to do so. The controller will have to understand the pilot's intentions as best as possible, and deal with the consequences of those intentions (e.g., once again, keeping other planes out of the way, or trying to find a new routing that the pilot will be willing to accept).
ATC is also responsible for passing some kinds of information to and from other parties, like in case of an emergency landing communicating with emergency responders so that they understand the nature of the emergency and whatever facts will help them respond more effectively. And they have to tell other ATC facilities about problems and situations that will affect them, like in-flight emergencies, closed airspace, closed runways, closed airport, etc.
Many of these things can and should be more automated than they are, but humans in these jobs are doing enormous amounts of reasoning, improvisation, and even social negotiation.
(I'm not a pilot or air traffic controller, just a former frequent flyer who liked listening to ATC communications and sometimes listens to liveatc.net when friends' flights are arriving or departing, or watches video recaps of various aviation incidents.)
Edit: Another case that I thought of: during an emergency landing, a pilot might be given either a shorter (more direct) or longer (more indirect) route than usual, in response to the pilot's assessment of which would be safer. The pilot could also be given a longer route than usual in order to have time to "work checklists" in preparation for the landing, or in order to burn off fuel so that the plane will weigh less (and be less likely to cause a huge fire) upon landing.
If some navigation equipment is broken, the ATC facility could help with navigation or with diagnosing the problem (by describing visual landmarks, or by estimating the plane's current speed and heading based on ATC radar).
Another system could hypothetically exist, but for practical use it is a huge migration issue. There are just too many planes in use that only support voice. The average airplane in general aviation usage is 50 years old.
Replaced, no. ATC, at least while we still have human pilots, is a system for instructing, organizing, and responding to humans, with all their flexibility and foible.
Now a copilot e.g. ATC audio parsed by an LLM into intended tracks, requests from traffic, integrated into the scope with projections for future separation etc…
> Thanks for reaching out! As you probably know, crashing an aeroplane is not generally recommended. There are many factors that may contribute to a crash, such as weather, technical malfunction or human error. Appropriate training, regular maintenance and flight planning are some of the best practices which help minimise the likelihood of a crash. I recommend revisiting these factors. Is there anything else I can help you with today?
Really? There were 3 aircraft involved. Game AI in the 1980s was good enough to handle the amount of "conflicting traffic" involved here. You're arguing in favor of automation, not against it.
For that matter, next time you visit the Bay Area, drop by the CHM in Mountain View and take a look at what SAGE could already do in the 1960s.
Yeah no it wasn’t just three, actually listen to the ATC auto between PAT25 calls into the controller and the crash — not to mention it’s still far more than a single aircraft on a remote planet
There's no good excuse, other than cost and training and equipment integration (which are massive costs, i know) for not having some kind of learning or at a minimum high levels of automation in 2025.
In fairness to the current administration, while the hiring freeze may have impacted ATC hiring, that is not causal here. No one hired last week would have been running things today (if they were hit with the freeze).
Someone that was hired weeks or months ago, but scheduled to start last week, could* have been included in the hiring freeze. There's examples here of rescinded offers after doing irs on-boarding: https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2025/jan/executive...
(Not that there's information that suggests this caused the incident)
If someone in your scenario had accepted the offer and was going to start last week, they would not have been included in the hiring freeze and would have been able to start.
> Job offers made prior to noon on January 20, 2025, for which the individual has accepted the position and has a designated start date on or before February 8, 2025. Those
individuals should report to work according to their respective designated start date.
They were replying to a comment that said "We're going to need to hire more controllers."
So I took their comment to be forward-looking.
It's worth adding that Elon Musk's email that had the supposed "buyout" went to ATC folks -- however management was telling them they'd need to work through their resignation date, regardless, removing the point of it. Then again, Musk denied the buyout will work this way, that agencies can just do whatever they want on this and OPM seems to agree, so who knows.
Is there an actual reason why the control tower work can't be fully automated? For train control lights we almost don't rely on human operators anywhere.
> For train control lights we almost don't rely on human operators anywhere.
Trains are on tracks. They basically move in one dimension. And the tracks can have (near) contact-based sensors along the way where the exact distance is known. (And in the US, there still is human conducting in a lot of the US)
That’s a very different problem space than the three dimension, unattached, space that air traffic moves in.
Because things can go from routine to multiple simultaneous life-threatening failures very quickly. Something like one flight declaring a mayday while another one just lost communication, all while the radar just started glitching in a weird way. Human intuition and common sense can sort it out. Deterministic algorithms would not.
E.g. On 9/11 ATC had to land almost 3000 planes in 1 hour. I'm not sure if that sort of national coordinated grounding is part of ATC training, but it's certainly not something I'd want to leave to some code that has never needed to run in production before.
It just seems like software could pretty easily compute non-intersecting flight paths for all planes and assign them accordingly. As well it could real time monitor all trajectories and continue to give out the updated flight paths. I don't see why you also couldn't run a trillion tests using real and simulated flight data to make sure it works well.
Air traffic control has a lot more things to deal with. There are scenarios like runway closed and all traffic has to be diverted. Loss of communication. Various emergencies. Weather changes. It's not just a question of 3D motion planning. Controllers in the tower also use their eyes.
In your imaginary system how is the software "tower" communicating with airplanes, using voice? I don't think we even have software that can reliably decode the variety of human voices over radio that a controller can respond to.
One can imagine a digital protocol to all airplanes but technology works its way really slowly into aviation.
Yes, it would require a piece of hardware, but that seems easy to regulate and wouldn't need to be very expensive certainly not in relation to the costs of owning and operating an airplane.
Seems like you’ve stumbled onto a very obvious solution that would be easy to implement and that no one else has ever managed to see, but which would totally revolutionize the airline industry. Time to start a business!
Because right now airplanes are flown by humans. A large part of atcs jobs is dealing with humans. Not every pilot will be able to fly the optimum flight path.
I Googled about this. London Heathrow is widely regarded as the busiest two runway airport in the world. They allow less than 50 arrival per hour. Are there any airports in the world that can have "hundreds of arrivals per hour"? Conservatively, 200 can be considered "hundreds", then you would need 8x runways operating at max capacity. That seems hard to imagine. Google also tells me that Atlanta (normally the business airport in the US) can handle about 250 "operations" per hour, so let's say half for arrivals.
Serious question: Why is 3D such a hard problem for modern computers? I could imagine a plane enters a cylinder of airspace near the airport and automatically communicates by radio waves information about itself. Then, HAL9000 can provide guidance as a landing plan.
I think the 3D part is fine, it's more "all of physics" coming into play with a plane. Like bird strikes, engine failures, trying to decide how to handle that. What is the loss function the AI is supposed to apply if an emergency landing is needed?
And then if you have people flying the planes, you have to deal with people mostly _but not always_ doing the right thing. So now you build out a plan and have to deal with consequences of that.
So at the end of the day you're still looking at funneling humans into a thing. At worst you could consider ATC as "customer support", there to press buttons on machines to actually handle a bunch of logistics because the pilots need to figure things out.
On top of all of this, airports are trying to get through a lot of flights quickly. So people can make snap judgements about whether planes can or cannot advance, what they should do, etc. No matter how well your plan is, the instant a pilot mishears something it's over.
If we can figure out self-driving cars, maybe we can talk about replacing pilots with AIs. But in the meantime there's somebody not following the plan often enough.
This does lead to an interesting question for me, though: what is the biggest "human movement" system that is actually entirely hands-off logistics? I would imagine that postal service companies are doing a lot but every major person moving operation seems pretty hands-on from the outside.
> If we can figure out self-driving cars, maybe we can talk about replacing pilots with AIs.
There's currently a human in the loop at almost all times but a great many planes are already self-flying. Autopilots are a thing, and have been for decades. Modern airliners routinely land themselves, and Garmin have developed an emergency landing system for general aviation aircraft which can handle everything including selecting an airport and communicating with ATC in the case of the pilot being incapacitated.
In many ways a self-piloting plane is an easier problem to solve than self-driving cars. Every plane has (or will have in the near future) a beacon on it transmitting it's location to every other plane around it to allow collision avoidance, and the procedure for getting from one major airport to another is pretty much prescribed in the form of standard departures, arrivals, and airways. The big difference of course is that if a car on the road breaks down and the AI can't handle it then the car can just stop, and baring someone not noticing and plowing into the back of them everyone will be fine, while if that happens in a plane it's a matter of time until the thing falls out of the sky killing everyone on board.
I should have said “arrivals and departures”. KATL has 2,100–2,700 arrivals and departures per day. Even if we assume those are equally spaced throughout the day (they aren’t) we’re over 100/hour.
But sure. It’s a mild exaggeration. It still doesn’t change the core point.
3D isn’t just “magically hard” for computers, but the process for routing traffic is wildly complex and a bunch of planes arriving and leaving at semi-random times, directions, and with different requirements and capabilities is where the problem starts not finishes.
The happy path is relatively easy. The exceptions are innumerable.
It's not just a 3D problem. It's all of the management in the air and on the ground. Could a computer eventually do it autonomously? I would think eventually, but the problem is handling exceptions. The Navy has been experimenting for years with a digital replacement of their Ouija board analog flight deck management tool for carriers [1]. And even then, people are still making most of the decisions.
And ATL is a crazy busy airport (there's an old doc on Netflix I think which is interesting). To confirm your question, ATL can run 5 runways nearly continuously[2]. It would be interesting to know what they peak at during a busy Monday morning, but my guess is they are more constrained by gate space at this point.
> Serious question: Why is 3D such a hard problem for modern computers? I could imagine a plane enters a cylinder of airspace near the airport and automatically communicates by radio waves information about itself. Then, HAL9000 can provide guidance as a landing plan.
Maybe I'm getting older. Maybe it is a more modern phenomena, enabled by a steady diet of 30 second videos.
Either way, I'm quite disturbed, regularly, recently, by the # of people who breezily stumble through quarter-baked thoughts while speaking dismissively, as if they've covered the surface of a complex universe that has been worked on very many smart people for decades, and now we can get to the real singular problem that'd fix everything, the one thing they've identified.
I don't even know where to begin trying to interlocute when the starting premise is "3D is hard for modern computers."
So I speak straightforwardly, in a way that I wish wouldn't be seen as rude, but it is.
So it goes.
You're right about the arrivals, but you missed the forest for the trees in the comment you're replying to.
"It" is an indefinite pronoun, meaning, "it" is by definition unclear to anyone but the speaker.
Here, "it" means "your involvement in this discussion"
To put it a bit more plainly, and apologies if it is hard to hear currently, I'd find this very helpful to hear this if I were you:
- The first comment was objectively, straightforwardly, dismissive. You questioned one statistic, then ignored the thrust of the comment and the comments leading up to it, instead framing the difficulty as "modern computers have a hard time with 3D", eliding the main point communicated.
- You then replied to my comment to tell me I'm wrong, it wasn't dismissive. This is also, in itself, dismissive. I had already fisked you, and I felt bad, so I didn't want to get overly literal and criticize you roughly again, in front of a crowd, so soon. So, I choose to keep it brief, rely on your ability to recognize the irony in your reply being dismissive in telling me the original comment wasn't dismissive, especially when combined with the wink.
To be hyper clear, it's...unusual...when communicating with others to ignore most of what they just said and fixate on one illustrative part of what they said, then when told you were being dismissive, to just say "I wasn't being dismissive" and put the burden on the listener. It's so unusual as to be objectively amusing.
You certainly did not mean to be dismissive, but you were. I sympathize with the reflex, I am 100% sure I've made many similar errors in my own journey, probably more than you ever have and will. It is a problem area for me.
With humility, I'd humbly suggest that when given feedback, rather than briefly asserting the feedback is incorrect, you come with curiosity and ask why it came off that way.
Given their answer, you'll be able to tell very quickly if the person is having a bad day/picking on you, or if you were unclear.
I'm a different person from the guy you originally called dismissive.
Your advice would make sense if I was the same person, but if I was the same person I would have responded very differently to the criticism. I gave a brief reply because I'm a third party.
Four Dimensional Navigation, actually! X, Y, Z, plus Time. By incorporating strict time constraints, air traffic controllers can schedule and merge arriving aircraft more precisely, reducing holding patterns and optimizing fuel usage.
>4D AREA NAVIGATION SYSTEM DESCRIPTION AND FLIGHT TEST RESULTS
>A 4D area navigation system was designed to guide aircraft along a prespecified flight path
(reference path) such that the aircraft would arrive at the approach gate at a time specified by
the ATC controller. Key components to achieve this requirement were:
>(1) stored reference trajectories;
>(2) a continuously recomputed capture trajectory to a selected waypoint on the reference trajectory so as to achieve the desired time of arrival;
>(3) electronic situation displays; and (4) a control system to follow the overall trajectory in space and time.
>Four-dimensional guidance algorithms for aircraft in an air traffic control environment
>Theoretical development and computer implementation of three guidance algorithms are presented. From a small set of input parameters the algorithms generate the ground track, altitude profile, and speed profile required to implement an experimental 4-D guidance system. Given a sequence of waypoints that define a nominal flight path, the first algorithm generates a realistic, flyable ground track consisting of a sequence of straight line segments and circular arcs. Each circular turn is constrained by the minimum turning radius of the aircraft. The ground track and the specified waypoint altitudes are used as inputs to the second algorithm which generates the altitude profile. The altitude profile consists of piecewise constant flight path angle segments, each segment lying within specified upper and lower bounds. The third algorithm generates a feasible speed profile subject to constraints on the rate of change in speed, permissible speed ranges, and effects of wind. Flight path parameters are then combined into a chronological sequence to form the 4-D guidance vectors. These vectors can be used to drive the autopilot/autothrottle of the aircraft so that a 4-D flight path could be tracked completely automatically; or these vectors may be used to drive the flight director and other cockpit displays, thereby enabling the pilot to track a 4-D flight path manually.
>4D-TBO: a new approach to aircraft trajectory prediction
>How four-dimensional trajectory data could contribute to aviation decarbonisation targets
>The real-time transmission of four-dimensional trajectory data has the incredible potential to greatly improve an aircraft’s trajectory prediction. By reducing the inaccuracy of current air traffic management (ATM) prediction models by approximately 30-40%, the Trajectory Based Operations in 4 Dimensions (4D-TBO) project is helping to pave the way to a more sustainable management of tomorrow’s air traffic.
>The 4D trajectory of an aircraft consists of the three spatial dimensions plus time as a fourth dimension. This means that any delay is in fact a distortion of the trajectory as much as a level change or a change of the horizontal position. Tactical interventions by air traffic controllers rarely take into account the effect on the trajectory as a whole due to the relatively short look-ahead time (in the order of 20 minutes or so).
>The implementation of 4D trajectory management is being researched by SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) in the EU and NextGen in the US.
>The 4D trajectory concept is based on the integration of time into the 3D aircraft trajectory. It aims to ensure flight on a practically unrestricted, optimum trajectory for as long as possible in exchange for the aircraft being obliged to meet very accurately an arrival time over a designated point.
Yes, this multiplies the complexity. When you talk to ATC you always need your tail number and airplane model. Why? Because a landing Cessna 150 is moving at 70mph. An incoming jet is moving at 130mph. And the jet can’t just slow down to 70 or it will fall out of the sky. They need to consider aircraft performance in all aspects of planning.
How would you deal with all sorts of emergencies involving human pilots? For unmanned aircraft(aka drones) it’s a lot easier to implement unmanned traffic management (UTM).
Direct them to land in the best location and make sure all other aircraft are on non-intersecting flight paths. What exactly is ATC doing that software isn't able to?
How many options are there for handling emergencies with aircraft now? You pretty much just have either land ASAP or circle to burn fuel and then land.
I mean this sincerely. What is more likely: that we've spent several decades ignoring very real automation solutions to this problem, or that it's a really, really hard problem that could get people killed?
Not an expert but I can't imagine that would go very well. Trains have a single axis of movement that sometimes cross or combines with others. Aircraft have three axes of movement all under human control.
not a bad question honestly.. I'd want some highly skilled humans there monitoring things but, yes. The air traffic control system of the US is absolutely incredibly amazing, but their entire mission, technology and equipment used to accomplish that mission, etc need to be reviewed, maybe rebuilt to be even safer.
> This order does not apply to military personnel of the armed forces or to positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety.
ATC surely falls under public safety. Additionally, the ATC issues stretch well back into the Biden term, and you can find plenty of articles discussing the controversy elsewhere.
I get a strong sense that they don't actually know what they cut as they stopped paying to guard ISIL prisoners. I could very easily see ATC getting hit by accident. Generally this administration neither thinks nor plans before acting
That article is propaganda from the same people who brought you the Iraq War. That’s exactly the sort of funding spigot we should be stopping so we can figure out what the hell is going on. Why the hell are we paying for prison guards in Syria? At one point CIA backed militias in Syria were fighting DOD backed militias: https://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-cia-pentagon-...
Everyone obviously wants to use critical services as a shield to avoid scrutiny on them. But by all indications the administration was ready to go on day 1, and insofar as stuff is being cut or halted a decision was made to allow that to happen.
I don't know what was going on with Syria, sounds real bad, but your claim about the administration having clear plans they're executing from day 1 is clearly false. This is sourced reporting, not analysis:
So the LA Times is not part of the propaganda that brought us the Iraq War? And the US must, must at all cost, stop paying for prison guards to figure it out?
There's no other way to just ... figure it out? You know, by studying the situation?
And when has “studying the situation” ever worked to make the government stop wasting money destroying the Middle East? Obama promised to change this stuff, and he couldn’t do it, because he innately trusted the same people who made the mistakes to “study” how to fix them.
"Surely"? This is only a few days after a change of administration along with sweeping government changes. Don't you think it's worth asking questions a little more deeply than this?
> President Trump signed an executive order instituting the freeze on Monday shortly after his inauguration, but allowed for exceptions for positions related to immigration enforcement, national security or public safety.
Important to read the details! There will be lots of misinformation as people invoke the minority of critical jobs as cover to defend the less critical ones.
I believe this happened in DC SFRA, which is a 30-mile radius specially controlled airspace due to the level of traffic and national security interests.
And we also did make it basically impossible for ATC workers to strike, so its not like the ATC workers could have said "fix this shit so people don't die or we will strike" because they can't really and anyone who says it anyways alone is going to be given the boot and blacklisted from the job. Not to mention the amount of training and effort needed to become one in the first place with basically zero job security or recourse if you make the wrong person angry.
If you listen to the ATC recording, around 15:50, they instruct the helicopter to watch for traffic, specifically this flight, and clears them for virtual separation.
It's the helo's fault. They likely misjudged the plane due to assuming it was a large jet but it was a regional jet, so it was way closer than they thought it was.
It's a tragedy, but I don't see how it would be ATC's fault. But that's just my 2 cents.
It could be that the right call was for ATC to deny the request for visual separation and for them to do the deconflicting themselves. Not saying that's the case, I don't know, but that's one way it could be (partially) ATC's fault.
It's way to early to say but one of the threads seemed to indicate the helicopter pilot was told about the airplane and instructed to maintain visual separation. I used to be a military air traffic controller and that was fairly common practice but I wasn't aware this is something that happens in civil aviation where usually the margins should be much higher.
Crazy and sad. I guess we'll learn more over the next few days. Going into the water is maybe better than crashing on land. Hopefully some people make it.
It's very common for civilian ATC to instruct pilots to maintain visual separation, especially when they're both in the approach pattern. For airliners, TCAS gives an extra level of safety to guard against pilot errors. But I think many military aircraft lack TCAS.
> When visual approaches are allowed, controllers can tell pilots to maintain visual separation from other aircraft, so they don’t have to leave as much of a buffer as with an instrument landing (where it’s entirely on the controllers to provide proper spacing).
From an incident at SFO where a Luftansa plane was not allowed to perform a landing using visual separation at night, and therefore was delayed interminably:
TCAS is always active if your transponder mode dial is in such a position, so it always calls out other aircraft that are nearby and could pose a threat of mid-air collision. However, resolution advisories are inhibited near the ground. The last thing you want to be telling a pilot to do is to increase their descent when they're only a thousand feet above terrain -- this would at the very least trigger a more serious GPWS callout, the response to which is drilled into pilots during training -- pull up, directly into the path of the thing TCAS would want you to avoid. If the other aircraft also has TCAS equipped and enabled, and their RAs aren't inhibited, they will still get a climb instruction (both crews usually get opposite instructions in order to maximise the vertical separation).
Correct. At that altitude TCAS RAs were almost certainly inhibited. They might have gotten a TA.
On the tapes, the military helicopter was warned about the airliner. They replied that they had the traffic in sight and requested to maintain visual separation.
It is so incredibly tiring that you dweebs try to blame every single bad outcome in the world on cough minorities cough "DEI", with zero evidence.
In fact, literally when you posted this comment there were already ATC recordings floating around of the controller telling the helicopter pilot to maintain separation from the exact airliner they crashed into.
I was trying to say: some people will reflexively try to put some blame on dei initiative in addition to overwork etc but (2nd paragraph) not sure why.
There are some good replies so I I'm not going to delete my (now obviously) poorly written comment.
Also, it appears that one of the aircraft was a military (not police) H-60 Blackhawk helicopter.