Fuck AI for this, but there’s a lot of room in ATC for further automation. To be perfectly honest, if the planes can more or less land themselves, and they’re all fly-by-wire, I could see nearly automating the whole thing. Phase it in over a 10-year plan… computers HAVE to be able to be better at this than one unpaid, overworked, under-rested controller.
I’m all for automation if it works and if it improves safety but as far as I know they haven’t proven that yet. I’d like to see an AI air traffic controller running in a simulation for many many years of simulation time first before we would even begin to talk about implementing it in real hardware.
AI is fine for this… assuming we’re talking about a specifically trained machine learning model that is actually made to handle ATC and not just shoehorning an LLM into a job it was never intended to do.
Honestly, I’d put it at too high a risk for weighted models. We have ton’s of pathfinding navigation code out there that could solve this outright on a raspberry pi :) not that i’d reccomend the pi…
Counterpoint: just look at the Air Canada crash that recently happened where a controller let a fire truck cross in the path of a landing aircraft.
Planes may have all this technology but that only involves what’s happening in the air, not on the ground.
Now maybe all ground crew could have vehicles equipped with transponders and tracked as well, but there are also incidents of people randomly ending up on the runways / taxiways, or animals, or non airport vehicles.
Fuck AI for this, but there’s a lot of room in ATC for further automation. To be perfectly honest, if the planes can more or less land themselves, and they’re all fly-by-wire, I could see nearly automating the whole thing. Phase it in over a 10-year plan… computers HAVE to be able to be better at this than one unpaid, overworked, under-rested controller.
I’m all for automation if it works and if it improves safety but as far as I know they haven’t proven that yet. I’d like to see an AI air traffic controller running in a simulation for many many years of simulation time first before we would even begin to talk about implementing it in real hardware.
That’s the problem. No one wants to test Ai like that. Just dive right in and use it, I’m sure it’s great!
Could test it out at small low-volume/non commercial airports first & go from there
I’d start with computer Sims before putting people’s lives on the line, but then from your suggestion
AI is fine for this… assuming we’re talking about a specifically trained machine learning model that is actually made to handle ATC and not just shoehorning an LLM into a job it was never intended to do.
Honestly, I’d put it at too high a risk for weighted models. We have ton’s of pathfinding navigation code out there that could solve this outright on a raspberry pi :) not that i’d reccomend the pi…
Counterpoint: just look at the Air Canada crash that recently happened where a controller let a fire truck cross in the path of a landing aircraft.
Planes may have all this technology but that only involves what’s happening in the air, not on the ground.
Now maybe all ground crew could have vehicles equipped with transponders and tracked as well, but there are also incidents of people randomly ending up on the runways / taxiways, or animals, or non airport vehicles.
With the amount of AI powered cameras being put up around cities around the world… Yea they could use tech like that to monitor runways too