The FAA’s Hiring Scandal

Instead of bickering over who gets a job that fundamentally should be automated by now, they should focus on developing technology that doesn't rely on people. Or at least uses automation for 95% of the job and delegates to a person only when rare exceptions arise. ATC is ripe for disruption from AI, and now that we have LLMs and speech models on par with human ability, its a short walk in the park to imagine a fully automated ATC model.

Sit in a tower for a day before talking about automation. Remember ten years ago when people said human-driven cars would soon be illegal? The number of fact-specific edge cases that happen every shift mean ATC is far far from automation.

> a job that fundamentally should be automated by now, they should focus on developing technology that doesn't rely on people.

Just to be clear: you think that air traffic control is fully automatable?

You think that ATC could be automated with the tools we have today?! I knew I'd get some wild takes in the comments but this one is absolutely next level. And I'm an AI maximalist!!

Everything is heavily automated right now up to and including autopilot landings. The people are in the loop to cover the gaps where automation doesn't exist or when it fails. Everything is so tightly scheduled at airports now that any kind of failure in automation would pretty rapidly lead to catastrophic outcomes if humans weren't constantly involved in decision making. Even if you just had humans on "stand by" it would take to long to get them up to speed on the context if things went sideways.

Yeah my biggest concern with any kind of automation is handling and recognizing edge cases. There are already manual systems like flight levels and patterns for traffic management. But what happens if one plane starts deviating because of something unexpected? Then you have to respond to a specific situation and the reason for deviating matters quite a lot. Think about all the ways your car can break down.

Sort of. There’s like 5 conditions of automation commercial planes can be in. The automation mostly functions to make the pilots workload manageable, not to make their workload non existent. Commercial flights used to have a crew of 3, captain, first officer and flight engineer. The automation has reduced the workload to eliminate the flight engineer role and make flights operable by 2 people.

There's a lot of automation, but it's the same situation with "self driving" cars. Until you get to nearly 100% trustworthy full automation, you need people actively making decisions constantly, so automation is mostly in the form of assists rather than full automation.

We have an automated system to prevent mid-air collisions, it's called TCAS, Traffic collision avoidance system. For safety reasons, it is inhibited at 1000 feet AGL or below, to prevent dangerous descents into terrain.

How would your mythical ATC automation take that situation into account, if it even thought about that edge case.

> Remember ten years ago when people said human-driven cars would soon be illegal? The number of fact-specific edge cases that happen every shift mean ATC is far far from automation.

This. Commercial jets have had full auto taxi, take off, fly, land capability for a long time at supported airports. A human is still in the loop for parts of it due to the potential for something to deviate from nominal in a novel way at almost any time.

> Sit in a tower for a day before talking about automation.

Everything is easy when you don't know about it.

They are, this is supposedly part of the "Nexgen" air traffic system. I think eventually airlines will be forced into greater automation. When a possible collision scenario arises, the plane will take over and evade on it's own. Airplanes will increasingly become automated and pilots wait for emergencies.

A human is in the loop for all parts. Every essential step is done by humans (flap/gear control, throttle up for takeoff). The airplane doesn't make decisions, rather it does what the humans tell it to. Autopilot is not automation.

Flights are operable by 1 person, and this is in fact the normal state of affairs in general aviation. The second person on commercial aircraft is there mostly for redundancy, although obviously having another pair of hands makes things easier.

Redundancy is definitely part of it, but 2 people also make things much much easier and reduce accident likelihood when unexpected things start happening and the workload increases. Lets say there is some severe mechanical issue, you want someone to run through a checklist to address the mechanical issue and fly the plane which is likely now out of autopilot, and another to find alternate places to land, etc.