Comment by flerchin
21 hours ago
I was in a tower last year. They were sequencing aircraft with little loops of paper placed onto a wooden dowel. It can and should be better. Doesn't need to be whiz-bang, but it should not be paper slips and wooden sticks. (and floppy disks)
Paper flight progress strips [1] have famously resisted replacement, even though they keep trying [2].
Every 5 years or so, a different publication will write an in-depth story about how difficult they are to replace, because nothing works nearly as well, and the controllers go back to using paper every time a new system is trialed. I think I've even read about them in a cognitive psychology textbook at uni.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_progress_strip
[2] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/tfdm/efs
That is really not the worst thing about ATC. Far from it.
I have heard experienced pilots lamenting that we're still using voice on a scratchy radio, with garbled audio and people accidentally talking over other transmissions both being constant problems, for essentially all vital comms.
While I have no problem with keeping that as a fallback, there's zero reason why we shouldn't have, at least for airliners that have two pilots, a text-based communication system. We can still convert the text to speech in the cockpit to keep awareness the same, but we could play overlapping transmissions one after the other. And think of the other advantages. People wouldn't get callsigns wrong, could be alerted specially when their callsign was being talked to...
It's complicated because we will need to cooperate with all countries, but it's not like we don't have ICAO to work within.
We already have some systems in place for this, specifically stuff like ACARS and CPDLC. I suspect the issue is in congested terminal airspace, though; if you have many aicraft talking to an approach controller it is not uncommon to have multiple transmissoins at the same time.
However, approach phases are exactly the same periods when the pilots probably shouldn't be looking at their FMCs and texting. Voice communication is faster, and so is acknowledgement of voice commands, while allowing the pilots to concentrate on more critical controls. For example, in many airports it is possible to get departure clearances and such via text, but take-off clearance and taxi instructions will still be voice over radio.
Does it still work when the power goes out? Is it easy to troubleshoot? Not everything needs to be overly-complicated.
They have backup power at the airport, and no, jetliners are not arriving and departing in the event of a power outage in the tower.
This is nearly the exact reason most 'smart home' systems fail eventually. They become very brittle after the hardware gets 'old'. Where as the dumb tech from the 1950s still 'just works' and costs 1/20th of the smart switch.
In that system you can tell what is going on by looking at in a glance and works with no power. Sometimes simple is a great answer.
However, I can think of one reason the 'no power' argument fails. They do a lot by radio. That needs power. Also you would need to retrain everyone. Oh and you probably would get locked into one company that wants to control the whole software stack and sell tons of support.
I have a friend who is a real estate agent for the wealthy. He laughs at the people who automate their homes. The automation inevitably fails, the vendor has disappeared, and the owner is faced with ripping all the wiring out of the walls and replacing it. Usually it gets replaced with conventional wiring.
When my home was built in 1999, I poured over all the home automation systems. I opted for conventional wiring. But I did wire every room (myself) with cat5 cable and RG6 coax, in a star configuration. It has served me very well, no problems at all.
I don't use the RG6 anymore, as my TV service comes over the intertoobs now. The cat5 isn't supposed to work with gigabit equipment, but it works fine. Wifi has improved by leaps and bounds, but I still rely on hardwired ethernet, as it is stupid reliable.
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So my mother worked at a bank when she was in college. This is the 70s. Later in life she went back to work, in the 90s, at a bank. When the computers went down and they had to close the books on paper and she was the only one that knew how to do it.
There is something to be said for knowing how to deal with critical systems when the automation breaks.
My grandpa used to be a manual typesetter in the newspaper industry and retired in the 80s.
A few decades later, similar story, he came back to work part time, when desktop publishing was all the rage.
Welp, of course the computers went down.
So they fired up the old hot metal typesetting machines and he manually set all 100,000 words of that Newspaper by hand, and then they went to print using 19th century steam powered print lines.
Except, that story is total bullshit that I made up. Because "the computer went down" is something we can mitigate much easier than doing everything by hand.
Sometimes the old technology actually is objectively worse, inefficient, and obsolete. Like floppy disks, or manually having humans close the books at a bank.
Better in what way? They have avoided replacement specifically because they work extremely well and none of the alternatives have been demonstrably better.
Those things actually work great, not everything has to be modernized for modernization sake... that's how we get cars with touchscreens instead of buttons and knobs.
a mechanical (wood, paper , etc) state machine is very resilient and easy to read even from across the room. No electricity demands, no lighting needed. Contains it's own mutual-exclusion (only one person can modify it at any time).
the digital version would require 10+ endpoints with 1000x points of failure.
To be fair light does help with reading paper