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.

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.

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.