alt Hacker NewsOn the flipside, look at the success of TCAS. It doesn't have a perfect operational history. It hasn't completely eliminated midairs, either. But it took a relatively rare event and further reduced the frequency by about a factor of 5.
I wouldn't be so quick to rule out that there's some kind of relatively easy technological double check that could greatly reduce incidents. The fact that we've not gotten there despite years of effort to reduce runway incursions doesn't mean that it's not possible.
Replies
Yeah but TCAS works inside each airplane. ATC (and ground operations) require coordinating across multiple types of aircraft, at airports across the world, with high precision AND humans in the loop (there are A LOT of edge cases).
This is a REALLY hard problem that the US cannot solve alone. It would require extensive global coordination.
Not insurmountable, but this is not something you can easily roll out piecemeal. If even a single aircraft lacks the compatible equipment you're back to the existing system.
TCAS is fantastic - absolutely stellar example of effective automation.
But calling a replacement of major ATC functions with software a "simple fix" is a perfect illustration of why this is a bad idea. Nothing about human-rated safety-critical software is simple, and coming at it with the attitude that it is? In my view, as an experienced pilot, flight instructor, spacecraft operator, and software engineer, that thinking is utterly disqualifying.
Besides, there already are a lot of "simple" fixes in place for this problem, e.g. RWSL, which didn't prevent this accident.