W3W contains homonyms and words that are easily confused by non-native english speakers. Often within just a few KM. The latter is why ATC uses "niner", to avoid confusing "nine" and "nein".

Talk to someone deep in the GIS rabbit hole and you'll get a rant about how bad W3W is: https://cybergibbons.com/security-2/why-what3words-is-not-su...

Also, "tree" for 3 and "fife" for 5.

Wernher von Braun polled his reports for whether the rocket was reliable or not. Each engineer replied "nein".

Von Braun reported that the rocket had six nines probability of success.

That's "What3Words" -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words -- a system for representing geographic location using globally-unique word triads.

WTW is a proprietary system that should never be used:

https://www.walklakes.co.uk/opus64534.html

The biggest fault (besides being proprietary) is that you must be online in order to use WTW. The times that you might need WTW are ALSO the times you are most likely to be unable to be online.

> The biggest fault (besides being proprietary) is that you must be online in order to use WTW.

That doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

It's still not a great system – many included words are ambiguous (e.g. English singular and plural forms are both possible, and an "s" is notoriously difficult to hear over a bad phone line), and it's proprietary, as you already mentioned.

It's definitely not the case, as the word list and algorithm are not secret (notwithstanding that they're proprietary) and have been re-implemented and ported into at least a couple of languages that allow for offline use. I have a Rust implementation that started life as a transliteration from Javascript. I wouldn't recommend using it, still -- I wrote it in the hope of finding more problems with collisions, not because I like it.

That would actually be pretty bad. As mentioned, W3W is propritary, requires an online connection, and has homonyms. On top of that, you need to enter these waypoints into your aircraft's navigation system - sometimes one letter at a time using a rotary dial. These navigation systems will stay in service for decades.

Aviation already uses phonetically pronounceable waypoint names. Typically 5 characters long, for example ALTAM or COLLI for RNAV (GPS) waypoints. Easy to pronounce, easy to spell phonetically if needed, and easy to enter.

The problem is the list of waypoints are independently defined by each country, so duplicates are possible between countries.

Rather than replacing a system that mostly works (and mandating changes to aircraft navigation systems, ATC systems, and human training for marginal benefit)... an easier fix would just be to have ICAO mandate that these waypoints are globally unique.

If only there was a globally unique set of short two-letter names for every country that could be used as prefixes to enforce uniqueness while still allowing every country to manage their own internal waypoint list.

If only.

I'm sure they thought about this at some point. Airports already have a country-code prefix. (For example, airports in the Continental US always start with K.)

For whatever reason, by convention navaids never use a country prefix. Even when it would make sense - the code for San Francisco International Airport is "KSFO", but the identifier for the colocated VOR-DME is just "SFO". (Sometimes this does make a big difference, when navaids are located off site - KCCR vs CCR for Concord Airport vs the off-site Concord VOR-DME, for example.)

It's even worse for NDB navaids, which are often just two letters.

Either way, were stuck with it, because it's baked into aircraft avionics and would be incredibly expensive to change at this point.

Yes, but country-prefixes are something you could migrate gradually in a backwards-compatible way.

"Waypoint Charlie Alpha Dash ALKOG, over."

"This is an old machine, so just ALKOG then, over."

I always love it when someone helicopters in to a complex, long-established system and, without even attempting to understand the requirements, constraints or history, knows this thing they read on a blog one time would fix all the problems thousands of work-years have failed to address.

As software developers, we are often living in our own bubble. As a pilot and developer working on an aviation solution, I quite often run into this issue when discussing solutions with my colleagues.

Well, it would be hard for them to helicopter in with their navigation system. ATC would have a field day. ;)