Comment by kgilpin

If you were to design a modern way to solve this problem, you wouldn't end up with a pile of nineteen sixties era equipment and some very stressed ATC people and pilots trying to communicate over a noisy VHF radio channel.

The challenge:

- electrical planes are coming and are going to cause an influx of pilots who can now afford to own and fly their planes. Teslas with wings basically. Cheap to buy, cheap to fly, lower noise, no emissions, what's not to like? It will take some time but early versions of these things are being certified right now. The 100$ hamburger run becomes a 5$ coffee run. It's going to have obvious effects: more people will want to get in on the fun. Way more people.

- a lot of those things will be used to fly medium distances for work in bad weather; which creates an obvious need for some level of ATC interaction.

- Likewise, cheaper/sustainable commercial short hops are going to increase traffic movements.

- Autonomous drones and planes are going to be part of the mix of traffic ATC has to factor in. Autonomous operation is key to operating safely. Especially in low visibility situations. Shuttle flights between city centers and terminals, short local hops, package deliveries, aerial surveillance, etc. On top of regular planes with way smarter auto pilots than today. The volume of this traffic will be orders of magnitudes of what ATC deals with today.

There's some time to prepare for this. Certification processes move slowly. But a lot of this stuff is being experimented with right now at small scale or stuck in the certification pipeline already. We're long past the "will it work" moment for most of this stuff. Technically, this would be happening right now if the FAA would allow it. They'll be fighting a losing battle to slow this down and delay the inevitable here. But the end result is that ATC needs to be ready for orders of magnitude more movement in their controlled air spaces. And right now they clearly aren't.

In short, all this requires new, modern tools. It's obvious. Training more ATC people to do things the way we have been doing them for the last 50 years is not a good plan for the next 50. It's a stop gap solution at best. With a very short shelf life.

I am in the sector, I develop ATC software. It is not rocket science (which was also solved with money actually) you can actually solve ATC with more money.

It's refreshing to see someone say it.

As a (non-commercial) pilot it's honestly infuriating watching people who have never tried to fly a plane, never tried to locate and identify another aircraft from the air, and never controlled (or even sat with a controller or toured a tower, tracon, or center) make these claims and statements about how easy these problems they don't understand are to fix as if they're experts on the topic.