Deep dive into the UK air traffic control meltdown

Re:Deep dive into the UK air traffic control meltdown by tjohns on Monday September 11, 2023 @06:06PM (#37474340)

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.

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Re:Deep dive into the UK air traffic control meltdown by Pxtl on Monday September 11, 2023 @10:30PM (#37476405)

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.

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Re:Deep dive into the UK air traffic control meltdown by tjohns on Monday September 11, 2023 @11:35PM (#37476731)

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.

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Re:Deep dive into the UK air traffic control meltdown by Pxtl on Tuesday September 12, 2023 @11:54AM (#37483161)

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."

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