I think pilots get a lot of situational awareness as well from listening to the common frequency.
I don't pretend to know much about aircraft control, but my understanding is that controllers generally are hopping between several planes in quick succession and they follow a strict subset of English when communicating with pilots. So, I'd be surprised if the task required advanced reasoning skills that would be impossible recreate in an algorithm.
> I think pilots get a lot of situational awareness as well from listening to the common frequency.
That seems like it could be solved in other ways though. For instance, the airport could publish the relevant information into a data stream and broadcast it to air traffic.
It could be displayed on a screen within the cockpit. The cockpit could also have a computer that read certain information aloud to the pilots to provide important information without them needing to look at the screen. Furthermore, airports could broadcast the same alerts on the old analogue radio channels to legacy aircraft.
That's already a thing with the big aircraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACARS
You can decode them on your SDR, they're in-the-clear:
VHF ACARS (fairly local):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGD_GFxH9ps
and the satellite version of the system here (every aircraft shares 1 of 4 geosynchronous satellites and you can pick up some interesting things):
CPDLC exists today and has been in use for a couple of decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controller%E2%80%93pilot_data_...
However, like everything in aviation, progress is slow because aircraft are expensive to buy, can last a long time, and are very expensive to modify.
The use of the word "protocols" underlines that it's kind of weird that we're still handling these comms through scratchy, staticy analog radio with humans at both ends. ATC uses computers to track flights and assign flight paths, why is it so difficult to have their computers talk directly with the aircraft? And I don't even mean remotely controlled flight, just "here's what ATC is asking you to do, press button to ack".
That's mostly a rhetorical question, mind you, since modernizing ATC is a notoriously difficult problem and FAA's NextGen has been under construction since 2007, with vague hopes of getting something usable by 2025. But still.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Transporta...