ATC Total Overhaul

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Lowflynjack

Lowflynjack

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Jack Fleetwood
President Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy say they'll ask Congress to fund a full-scale replacement of the nation's air traffic control system. What does a total overhaul of the ATC system look like? Would they change ADS-B? Better radar systems for controllers? Duffy mentions updating the ATC system with fiber, wireless, radar, and satellite technology from its current copper wiring and antiquated systems that still use floppy disks.

“That wouldn’t have happened if we had the right equipment,” Trump said. “If we had the right equipment you would have heard bells and whistles going off, and it would have alerted long before that would have happened. Two minutes before, there would have been a lot of time.”

Trump said it would be his preference for a single contractor to handle the entire project. He suggested IBM and Raytheon as possible candidates.
 
StraightnLevel said:
Congress already has a bill in process.

Honestly, I'm glad to see someone talking about updates. My guess, though, is that it will be a MUCH larger project over a longer timeline than anyone expects.
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Yeah, they're saying a much bigger project than what's already in process. That one is $15B, but Duffy is saying it shouldn't take more than 18 months. You know, because government always hit's their timelines!!
 
Do you think IBM or Raytheon can build equipment that predicts what a pilot will do 2 minutes in the future?
 
StraightnLevel said:
Honestly, I'm glad to see someone talking about updates. My guess, though, is that it will be a MUCH larger project over a longer timeline than anyone expects.
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Kinda like the current one, that started in the 90s and still isn't done?

Bell206 said:
This has been a concern for years. Here's one of the more recent reports on it. They just lacked priority funding to get it done like a number of things aviation related.
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I wouldn't be surprised if they just fund some of the things that most need an update and then call it "done" and declare victory without actually doing much substantive change. Government (and other large orgs) at work!

Though I'm sure if Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed, etc grease enough palms, they can start on another 30-year project that goes way over budget.
 
Velocity173 said:
All AI. No humans.
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ATC of the future. A computer, a human, and a dog. The Computer runs the air traffic, and the dog is there to bite the human if he tries to touch the computer.

(Old joke, I know - but it never gets old LOL)
 
WDD said:
ATC of the future. A computer, a human, and a dog. The Computer runs the air traffic, and the dog is there to bite the human if he tries to touch the computer.

(Old joke, I know - but it never gets old LOL)
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But what technology are they going to use to allow the controller’s dog and the pilot’s dog to sniff each other’s butts?
 
Lowflynjack said:
President Trump and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy say they'll ask Congress to fund a full-scale replacement of the nation's air traffic control system. What does a total overhaul of the ATC system look like? Would they change ADS-B? Better radar systems for controllers? Duffy mentions updating the ATC system with fiber, wireless, radar, and satellite technology from its current copper wiring and antiquated systems that still use floppy disks.

“That wouldn’t have happened if we had the right equipment,” Trump said. “If we had the right equipment you would have heard bells and whistles going off, and it would have alerted long before that would have happened. Two minutes before, there would have been a lot of time.”

Trump said it would be his preference for a single contractor to handle the entire project. He suggested IBM and Raytheon as possible candidates.
Click to expand...
Didn't we attempt this back in the 80s?
The real question - how to pay for it? (don't ask stupid question when you know the answer)
 
I’ll be impressed when we get a full text and organized METAR and eliminate the 8 byte constrained short text we get now. Or an intelligently organized Notam. Or a real back up to GPS (I swear it’s just a rumor that there are any working VORs left).
 
AKiss20 said:
Just get the same bunch of 22 year old idiot vibe coders who worked at DOGE to redo the whole thing. What could go wrong? They already monkeyed around with Social Security, the Treasury, and possibly SIPRNet. ATC is a walk in the park.
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They’d have to find all of the floppy disks and DOS boot disk first LOL.
 
Why is my brain drawing comparisons to slapping new engines on a B-52?

Not that I have any knowledge of ATC systems, but what would it look like to start fresh. Let's go to the theoretical extreme, tear down and replace every tower, Center, and Approach control building, rebuild and replace everything brand new with what?

Really hard to push for upgrading a system without defining what an upgrade is. Are we talking upgrading the existing Windows 95 with Windows 98, or buying a whole new computer?
 
AKiss20 said:
Just get the same bunch of 22 year old idiot vibe coders who worked at DOGE to redo the whole thing. What could go wrong? They already monkeyed around with Social Security, the Treasury, and possibly SIPRNet. ATC is a walk in the park.
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Yeah, can you imagine those idiots fired the ONLY person who had the keys to all the bathrooms in Yellowstone. What dunces to take a finely tuned system where thousands of square miles of parkland are at risk of one person getting (God forbid) hit by a bus one day, and they go and fire that one person! All the campers and hikers had to pee in the woods!

P.S. -- Anyone who calls Elon or his hand-picked employees "idiots" have to establish their bona fides by naming for us all of the Fortune 500 companies THEY founded (for reference, Musk's count is at least 3).
 
StraightnLevel said:
Congress already has a bill in process.

Honestly, I'm glad to see someone talking about updates. My guess, though, is that it will be a MUCH larger project over a longer timeline than anyone expects.
Click to expand...

kind of like nexgen, eh?
 
DJTorrente said:
P.S. -- Anyone who calls Elon or his hand-picked employees "idiots" have to establish their bona fides by naming for us all of the Fortune 500 companies THEY founded (for reference, Musk's count is at least 3).
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What a simple world you must live in that being wealthy is the only sign of intelligence.
 
MauleSkinner said:
AI is still in its infancy, but AP is mature?
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Prediction is one of the things AI is really good at. Certainly not 100% accurate, but neither are humans. And even simple machine learning models would be more accurate than humans over short timeframes. Much less noisy.
 
Lindberg said:
Prediction is one of the things AI is really good at. Certainly not 100% accurate, but neither are humans. And even simple machine learning models would be more accurate than humans over short timeframes. Much less noisy.
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It doesn’t matter that humans aren’t good at it. Artificial Psychics aren’t going to predict where/how a particular pilot will **** up two minutes in advance.
 
MauleSkinner said:
It doesn’t matter that humans aren’t good at it. Artificial Psychics aren’t going to predict where/how a particular pilot will **** up two minutes in advance.
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They're much more likely to than humans are. And the fact that humans aren't good at it is precisely the point, since this is a primary requirement of the system.
 
Patients is a virtue especially when your waiting for congress to take any worthwhile action.
 
AKiss20 said:
What a simple world you must live in that being wealthy is the only sign of intelligence.
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Yours is the simple world if you believe that temporary possession of wealth alone is the relevant measurement. Any "idiot" (to borrow your word) can inherit wealth, or have wealth dropped on them via other seemingly random circumstances. They may even manage to hold on to some of it for a while.

Having the pile of wealth isn't the measure; building it is.

It's your simple view that would equate a dilettante heiress who is beneficiary of a fortune she didn't earn with an entrepreneur who manufactured a product or service most could scarcely conceive of much less achieve, then created the system to produce it and deliver it to others, with those others having found such value in those products or services that they freely traded their own wealth in exchange, over and over again. And then did so several times over in many different domains, to the point that the entrepreneur had amassed the greatest private fortune known on the planet.

To quote the fictional Cole Trickle "If you think it was luck, I'll go do it again."

Not to mention how simple it is to assume -- in the face of ample, even mountainous evidence to the contrary -- that someone who doesn't share your particular political priorities must be mentally defective, i.e., an "idiot".
 
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DJTorrente said:
P.S. -- Anyone who calls Elon or his hand-picked employees "idiots" have to establish their bona fides by naming for us all of the Fortune 500 companies THEY founded (for reference, Musk's count is at least 3).
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3? Which ones?

I count zero. He "founded" PayPal via merger, he "founded" Tesla via lawsuit, SpaceX isn't Fortune 500, and he didn't found Xwitter by any stretch of the imagination.

EdFred said:
Yeah, the number of people that I know on food stamps and welfare who blow us away with their intelligence is astronomical!
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Yeah! My company shut down the other day and I lost my job, and I forgot everything I ever knew! :rolleyes:
 
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