Also the jet fuel shortages from the Israel-Iran War means that there are fewer aircraft in the air. That should improve safety. Aircraft collisions taxiing around on the ground are easier to survive.
This is the first positive we’ve seen from Netanyuhu’s military ambitions that US taypayers are funding.
intercst
I put this as the second positive.
First positive is the new highly aggressive green energy policy lowering supply by 20% of polluting fossil fuels like oil and gas.
Let’s face it, Greenpeace would never be able to blockade oil and gas tankers with 12 Navy destroyers and an aircraft carrier or two.
Gives a completely new image when one thinks about the “militant Greens.”
I mean, it’s probably many more orders of magnitude more costly than any other fossil fuel reduction policy, like a tax or tariff, but we didn’t have to bother with slow, democratic norms like “Congress” and “regulatory comment periods.”
See? We have a super green administration. They have determined a way to stop global warming in its tracks. Shift the economy to electric. The genius part, its all the Iranians fault!
WOW amazing. I could never have pulled this off in a fantasy!
Cheers
Qazulight (Had my first beers since St. Patricks day, got a doozy of a buzz)
It solved like 6 huge issues in one genius policy maneuver.
People doubted the 4D chess skills, but here we are - that’s why it took a decade to incubate.
As a bonus, those garbage TIPS investments are finally paying off.
I find the AI comment interesting. How much of air traffic control could be done by AI assisted computer? If well done could be more reliable than over worked humans.
Google confirm FAA is using AI program called SMART to assist human controllers by identifying schedule conflicts and congestion up to two hours in advance.
Who is putting this together? FAA contracting with who? Does FAA hire programmers?
Google: Multiple companies hold contracts to develop and integrate artificial intelligence capabilities for the FAA. The agency does not have a single exclusive AI vendor, but instead relies on several key technology firms to modernize its air traffic control and data infrastructure:
Palantir Technologies: Holds a sole-source contract for data modernization and AI integration, and is competing to build the new SMART (Strategic Management of Airspace Routing Trajectories) AI air traffic management tool.
Thales & Air Space Intelligence: Both are also competing alongside Palantir to develop the agency’s new AI air traffic management systems.
Peraton: Was awarded the multi-billion-dollar prime contract to oversee the comprehensive overhaul and modernization of the National Airspace System, which includes the integration of agentic AI.
Skymantics: Holds an FAA contract for the Demonstration of En-Route Adaptation Coordination and Negotiation Services (DEACNS) to implement applied AI in traffic coordination.
BigBear.ai: Partnered with Concept Solutions to secure contracts for providing IT solutions and emerging AI technologies to the agency.
OpenAI: Reached agreements with the FAA and the Department of Transportation to provide foundational AI capabilities.
For more details on the agency’s overarching airspace upgrade strategy, you can review the FAA Newsroom.
Perhaps there’s a place for AI. But my thought is why are all communications done via radio? Why aren’t they done via text message?
Voices are hard to hear sometimes, particularly when you get to international flights and various accents.
Radio communications also must be done one at a time. If two people on a frequency transmit at the same time, the broadcast is completely garbled. Worse, the transmitters generally don’t know about it.
Because those speaking don’t know if the message has been received, the standard practice is for the recipient to repeat important messages back to confirm the communication has been heard and understood. That increases the usage of the radio frequency.
Lastly, you’re dependent on people remembering what has been said. At larger airports, taxi instructions can be long and complicated. Repeating those instructions is common.
A great deal of this communication could be replaced with text messages. Many of those messages could be handled with just a couple of pre-programmed key strokes for speed. Messages could go to a single aircraft instead of all planes in the area. There’s a written record to refer back to so that memories can be quickly refreshed.
And radios wouldn’t go away. There are times for atypical communications and emergency situations where voices are the most effective communication method. But getting half or more of communications off of radios would improve controller efficiency, improve the quality of communications, and take some stress out of a couple of very stressful jobs.
-–Peter
Until it starts hallucinating. So far, every single AI program I’ve read about starts hallucinating at some point.
Yeah, but you only mean this until the bombs start again.
So on again, off again.
We are far, far, far too early into AI to trust air traffic control to this. It is no where near safe enough when lives are at stake. This is just nuts.
And, it’s not cheaper.
Even if it is cheaper, fewer safety inspections are also cheaper. Not sure that is the metric that increases confidence in either situation.
I would personally prefer more of them - and we could likely pay them less (many of then get over $200k a year with great benefits including mandatory early retirement at 56).
I have dug with claude for one week into my code. Today I pointed out a component, claude said good thing it is there. Then we dug a little further and I said this? Claude said yes. I said what is the fix? Claude’s status went to down. Claude ate the Mushroom this time.
All AI deals in is what. What is object oriented. Claude has never conceived of why.
Just a guess on my part…but using voice probably allows for better multitasking. It allows the pilots to keep their eyes on instruments and the real world, rather than tapping and scrolling some screen.
Pilots have lots of practice doing this. A friend of mine was a Navy pilot instructor for a couple of tours and they train extensively on the ground doing many things at once while being bombarded with alarms, voice commands, erroneous instruments, etc.
Mike
In skimming through the article, the text mentioned automation, but I didn’t see “AI” as a prominent part of the article text. It also mentioned that the automation was more focused on overhead tasks, in order to put more of the available capacity on the core work.
As someone who works with both automation and AI tools, some of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen have come from confusing the two. I sincerely hope the ATC automation work is focusing on true automation. I’m pretty sure there’s a lot that can be done completely deterministically, which would very likely benefit from traditional automation.
If there’s value in also adding AI to the processes, I’d love to understand where that would be. In my experience, AI can be worthwhile when the input conditions are well defined and well limited, where the AI has been trained against the full range of those potential conditions, and where there is also some sort of “kill switch” for when conditions get beyond those limits.
There’s a reason why “true” AI-controlled driving is still so thoroughly geofenced (and often comes with a “remote controller”), despite there having been more than a decade of effort getting poured into it. The “base case” is pretty standard, but the number of things that can go wrong, both in isolation and in combination, is pretty high.
Regards,
-Chuck
As a counter-point, I don’t think humans are capable of multitasking. They can switch between tasks fairly quickly, but they can’t effectively do two things at once. (e.g. texting and driving - you can only do one at a time - although if you pick a low load point of driving you can get away with it. Mostly. Unless you don’t.)
For text messaging to pilots, they already have HUDs in most modern airliners. Tap a button and you can switch between seeing some instruments there or seeing the text message. And text messages can allow pilots to deal with the message on their schedule rather than the controller’s. Give an audio notification that a message is available, and the pilot can choose to deal with it now or put it off for a couple of moments while they deal with something else.
I seem to recall the order of importance in flying is: aviate, navigate, communicate. When things get hairy, fly the plane. Don’t talk to controllers. You can put off a text message, but you can’t put off a radio call. Well, you can, but then the controller is just going to repeat it in a moment, interrupting you again and doubling his/her workload for that message.
And with good text to speech systems, the pilot can have the message read to him if that’s better in the moment.
As an aside, airliners already communicate with their company largely via text while in the air. Look up ACARS
--Peter
PS - For heaven’s sake, get ATIS info onto text messages and off the air. What a waste of pilot’s time listening to a 30 second weather update when they could read it in just a few seconds.
