Why air traffic controllers are under pressure more than ever
Inside the growing stress of American air traffic control towers.
- Obsolete technology and shortages of Newark Liberty International Airport has resulted in current delays and cancellations.
- Experts warn that the FAA under-funding prevented the necessary technological improvements and the hiring of air controllers.
- The Secretary of Transport proposed a program to modernize the system and encourage hiring, but the financing of the congress is still necessary.
Ancient technology is behind recent delays and cancellations under way at Newark Liberty International Airport, but more recent technology will be an important part of the solution.
To summarize, on April 28, air traffic controllers managing traffic entering Newark experienced a brief Radar and radio breakdown. Similar failures have occurred at least three times since then, and in response, the Federal Aviation Administration and the airlines have Reduces the number of flights operating out of the airport.
This is the kind of exercises that the experts were warning has been inevitable for years.
“All these endowment problems, all these problems of use of copper wires instead of optical fiber, these have been there for a long time,” said Teday Sheldon Jacobson, computer teacher at the Graining College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, in USA.
Jacobson said that the technology of air traffic control towers is largely obsolete, but like an old car, it worked well until it begins to decompose.
“People are now careful,” he said. “They have put more aircraft in the sky than the system cannot absorb, and what happened is that we have reached a tilting point. We have so much volume, and we have roughly the same technology for controlling air traffic for decades.”
How did we get here?
The FAA air traffic control problems did not develop overnight, although Newark’s current headaches have surprised many travelers by surprise.
Industry observers have alert The FAA sub-financed congress, preventing the agency from modernizing its technology and limiting its ability to hire and train new air traffic controllers.
According to the Secretary of Transports Sean Duffy, the FAA is short 3,000 air controllers Nationally and continues to rely on obsolete technologies such as floppy disks to fulfill crucial functions.
However, Jacobson said, this does not mean that plane trips are not sure.
“The FAA, airlines and all supporting people have diligently worked to make trips by plane safer, and it has never been safer,” he said. And that is part of the reason why there are more delays and cancellations as the air traffic control equipment vacillates.
“The only way to ensure security is to lower the volume so that we are not at this tilting point,” said Jacobson.
What solutions have been proposed?
The successive administrations of the two parts of Washington have promised fixes to the FAA air traffic control program, but the solutions have been fragmentary so far.
Duffy recently announced a scanning program To modernize the agency’s technological infrastructure, as well as hiring incentives to attract more potential air traffic controllers.
However, a commitment to financing the congress was missing when it was announced. This obstacle prevented the previous administrations from implementing such revisions.
Even if the legislators finance the proposals of the Trump administration, the implementation of upgrades will probably take a long time.
“It will not happen in three years. It will take several years,” said Jacobson. “It’s expensive and takes time.”
He also warned that this would add expenses, complexity and time because upgrades will have to be deployed without withdrawing the current air traffic control system.
“You are trying to update a system while it still works,” he said.
Can AI help resolve air traffic control problems?
Finally, the FAA will deploy new technologies for air traffic control, and although Jacobson said that air traffic controllers will never be fully replaced by computers, he recognized that New Tech has a role to play in optimizing the country’s air space.
“If we leave that of the table, we fork to use more labor,” he said.
Jacobson said that, like FAA and airlines favor security above all, it has no sense to completely withdraw humans from the air traffic control equation. The unions of pilots have also long recommended the importance of the security of having two highly qualified aviators in the cockpit of each commercial flight, despite increasing calls from certain external groups to explore the automation of flight control. However, the use of artificial intelligence and other technologies to facilitate the controllers’ load could actually make the system safer.
“There are a lot of very superficial tasks which, by working with ATC, an AI system could direct the planes,” said Jacobson, such as issuing an initial clearance so that the pilots postpone their doors or guided them until the start of the traffic lane.
“You do not compromise safety, this is the most important goal, but you give them a little more breathing room or leg space to do their job.”
Zach Wichter is a travel journalist and writes the cruising altitude column for USA Today. It is based in New York and you can reach it at zwichter@usatuday.com.