Hard disagree with the notion this adds a degree of failure.

From a layman's perspective, it replaces one primary degree (pilot-control coordination) with another (a technological solution) and delegates the staffers to supervisory roles. That is a risk reduction due to the increase of confirmations and the independence between the staff decision and the software's decision.

Also once you fix a software bug, it’s fixed forever (generally). Humans introduce all sorts of fun variability every time the program is run.

Expecting mechanical accuracy from humans is a fool's errand.

ATC should be wearing VR goggles, visualizing approach and takeoff routing as it maps to flown with machines spotting the dangers similarly but differently from TCAS.

And the VR goggles help them read the minds of pilots about the speed in which they move their planes around on the ground, and when?

Move fast and break things has no place in aerospace nor aviation, just rolling whatever fancy new tech is there is not done for reasons. And this behavior made aviation as safe as it is today.

I interned at a VR lab at NASA Ames in the late 1990s. This very idea (ATC operations in low-vis conditions using VR or AR) was what fed their grant proposals. It has always been 20 years away; here are some of the things I learned there:

1) VR itself can lead to spatial disorientation and will introduce its own control issues.

2) A significant percentage of people (~1 in 4) cannot use VR without motion sickness. This is independent of #1. Modern VR (Oculus etc.) at first claimed to be better, but guess what, plenty of people still get sick. Sinus congestion can cause this even in those who are otherwise tolerant.

3) Position reporting of planes today is nowhere near accurate, reliable, or real-time enough to present a whole picture of runway ops. This is fixable with enough $$$...but who pays?

4) Even if these and other obstacles were cleared, I suspect the new "VR ops" procedures from the FAA would take years to be developed and approved, without some kind of urgent mandate.

My gut feeling is that we'll have automatic ground traffic control at major airports by the time the necessary systems are in place, and skip the goggled humans entirely.

If you talk about something like aviation, and start with "from layman's perspective", stopping there is usually not such a bad idea.

There is nothing wrong with a layman’s perspective in any industry, and aerospace is not certainly not the sole domain of safety critical systems. An aerospace layman might still bring insight from other areas, which was the case here IMO.

You have been repeatedly dismissing people in this thread, but HN is about being curious. “Leave it to the professionals” is neither satisfying nor interesting.

Curiosity is about learning, isn't it? Nothing wrong with asking questions, or following discussions and learn something new about an industry or domain you don't know a lot about.

Throwing ideas out to improve things, without properly thinking about the the root causes for incidents, not waiting for official investigations to be run, and all of that based on some audio recordings and headlines, or news coverage at best, is neither curious nor allows people to learn something. So yes, at a certain point, leave it to the professionals (whom else would one leave it to anyways?) is exactly the right thing to do. And maybe listen to people with more knowledge on a subject (probably not me in that case so).

Insisting on pre-formed "layman" opinions about something as peculiar as aviation, or aerospace, is the opposite of curiosity.

How are we supposed to learn if you just tell everyone to “leave it to the professionals”?

If you don’t agree with something someone posts, contribute to the discussion by explaining the issues. Why shouldn’t the ATC be sacked? Safety culture. Why shouldn’t they install ground radar? Complexity. Etc.

Appeals to authority are the worst kind of arguments because they don’t help us to understand what to expect from them.

Just think of it as CRM for the internet. :)

Great burn! But not a great refutation.

Hand-waving about "people" == "simpler" == "better" aside, read about TCAS.

Humans in the loop are a SPoF if they're there:

1. Solely to read information over a lossy, slow medium like analog radio. Digital data between ground and air systems should be the primary means of comms with voice radio as a backup channel for clarification and stating intent.

2. To flawlessly plan and avoid collisions between dozens of objects moving at high speed in 4 dimensions. Never going to happen. These should be done and verified mechanically, continuously.

Humans should be guiding and assisting mechanical, reliable automation of decision-making rather than playing telephone or doing long division on paper when calculators exist.

>> four dimensions

You're sure about that?

They likely mean { X, Y, Z, T } three spatial dimensions and time which are four orthogonal dimensions.

That said, it makes the "moving in" redundant and is shy a few dimensions if you want to go full descriptive phase space diagraming given velocity and acceleration in each spatial dimension are missing.

It is still just changing vectors and speed in three dimensional space so...

I suggest you take your objections up with the authors of, say,

A Four-Dimensional Space-Time Automatic Obstacle Avoidance Trajectory Planning Method for Multi-UAV Cooperative Formation Flight

or any number of other similar papers.

Many prefer to think of an objects path as a trajectory in space-time (four dmensions) and for two ojects to "collide" their paths must coincide within that 4-D space within an Epsilon for some value of WTF.

Other common examples of working in N dimensional spaces for values of N bigger than someones mother include: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_space

I never considered time as a 4th dimension in that sense. TIL.

Fun fact, now I can claim to plan in the 4th dimension by using lead times in supply chain planning!

But as ... you yourself ... note above, the planes aren't moving in four dimensions. If time is one of the dimensions, all the planes are doing is existing.

A plane (P1)'s past positions and projected future positions form a continuous path in R^4 (four dimensional euclidean space).

Another plane (P2)'s travel through various {X,Y,Z} positions at various times forms another path in R^4.

If those paths come close to each other then P1 and P2 are close in both space and time - ie. they are very close to a collision.

Collision detection and avoidance is problem laid out and (hopefully) solved in an R^4 euclidean space.

(at the very least - throw in some more independant variables that parameterise motion and you've got a higher order puzzle

Eg: Collision avoidance for two robot arms with 6 or 7 degrees of freedom each is a maze solving puzze in 12 or 14 dimensions).

Where do you think you're contradicting me?

The path of the plane is a static curve in 4-dimensional space, yes.

But the plane is not located at any point in the 4-dimensional space, and the position in 4-dimensional space that it doesn't have is not changing over time. Both of those things are required before you can describe the plane as "moving" within the space.

There is no secret backup time that will allow you to track the plane's hypothetical motion along an explicit time dimension. That's not a thing.

> But as ...

I confess. I literally had no idea what you were intending to convey with those two sentences so I restated alternatively what I intended to convey in the hope it might make clear my position (if that was an issue for you) or that I might learn more from your response.

> Where do you think you're contradicting me?

That's not a thought that I thunk. Therefore I have no response.

> But the plane is not located at any point in the 4-dimensional space

Every point along the 4D path trajectory of the plane in {X,Y,Z,T} is a literal {X,Y,Z} location of that plane at time T.

> Both of those things are required before you can describe the plane as "moving" within the space.

I certainly did not describe the plane as "moving" within R^4.

> There is no secret backup time that will allow you to track the plane's hypothetical motion along an explicit time dimension.

I utterly fail to understand what you intend to convey here.

Although I note that the actual (not hypothetical) velocity of the plane projected onto the time axis is very likely to be on the order of approximately one second per second.

The job ATC does is conceptually the same job as railway signalling (allocating non-colliding paths through a shared medium).