This.

Remember when all the Waymos were confused by a power outage? Now do that, but with airplanes that will fall thousands of feet and kill hundreds instead of park in the middle of the street.

I'm not saying we shouldn't automate things. We should. But, it's not easy. If it was, we would have done it already.

> Remember when all the Waymos were confused by a power outage?

I remember.

Do you remember (before Waymo existed) what happened to traffic in SF anytime the power went out?

I remember. It was pretty much the identical situation.

Traffic goes to hell when the traffic lights stop working properly (without Waymo and also with Waymo).

I think you missed the point. But sure, traffic goes to crap when the lights go out.

I think the point they're making is that the failure mode of a waymo and automated air traffic control could look the same from an angle, but would have very different consequences.

Speaking of runway crossings specifically, you could have an automated backup, and require authorization from both ATC and the automated system to enter a runway.

It should not be automated but it should be heavily augmented.

One of the failure modes should not be “guy forgot thing”.

That's what everyone screaming 'funding' doesn't seem to understand here. If your failure mode for potentially hundreds of people dying is one controller over radio forgetting something, then it'll happen eventually. And has happened, there's plenty of videos on youtube of near miss radio recordings. When a plan is landing at over 100mph simple good luck can take care of things the majority of the time.

It just feels wrong that the primary form of control in 2026 is voice over radio.

> Imagine it were 90% automated.

It already is.

> Now imagine there's a 3 hour outage of the automated system.

Planes divert to another airport, passengers grumble, end of story. Airport closures can and do happen all the time for all kinds of reasons, including weather or equipment malfunctions.

Except when the system fails regionally.

Then all the takeoffs will be cancelled, immediately reducing the workload, and planes will be manually landed.

We build pacemakers, AEDs, flight control software, and other mission-critical life-and-death software. The idea that we'll just forever keep the system run by specially trained humans with known and foreseeable faults because poorly designed software could fail is head-in-sand unreasonable.

Look what happened when the power went out in SF and the Waymos just stopped in the street because they were confused and there weren’t enough humans to direct them. Now imagine that but with planes that will fall out of the sky when they run out of fuel since they can’t land. Automating this is pants on head retarded.

That sounds like a poorly thought-out implementation.

An example of a poorly thought-out implementation elsewhere does not exclude the possibility of coming up with a better one than humans coordinating with their mouths over radio.