Discussion

Great at gaming? US air traffic control wants you to apply

londons_explore: Fully automated and human free air traffic control would save lives.Why would we be hiring new human air controllers now?

cromka: > Why would we be hiring new human air controllers now?I suppose because it's not fully automated?

csto12: They just need to push the big red automate everything button. I’m sure it’s just that easy.

dmitrygr: > Fully automated and human free air traffic control would save lives.I now know 100% that you are not a pilot. No thanks! 100% no thanks.

yrds96: Which tools do we have capable of automating it? LLMs? Not a good idea to put a machine that hallucinate 10% of the time in charge of human lives

HelloUsername: Source:https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/trumps-transportation-secretary...https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9MczWfLpBcw

flibbityflob: Have they tried paying them consistently?

bitwize: Claude Mythos will take care of it

cmcaleer: I'm sure an automated system would do great in 95% of conditions but it's that 5% where you really, really need a human in the loop to make judgement calls that would be incredibly difficult to program.Here's a classic example of a controller noticing a pilot is hypoxic, indirectly testing his competency and ability, and likely being careful with how he routed traffic around the unreliable pilot until he got better. This alone seems pretty hard to imagine automated with current technology without some overkill prone-to-failure solution.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVpfOvVgHtY

coppsilgold: If you were to design an ATC system from scratch then it can be automated. But with pilots having to actually talk to ATC (and sometimes talk over each other with no feedback) instead of observing their status on a screen and pressing buttons on what they want to do or change their status it seems like it will be quite hopeless for quite some time.What you can probably do is create a software backup system which observes traffic and simulates it into the future and notifies the human ATCs about risks. It might even be a good idea to try and digitize it for the ATCs so they talk less and press buttons more (which will feed into the simulation) and use TTS for the legacy transmissions to pilots that don't have an updated interface. Given the regulation on that industry it seems unlikely anyone competent enough to do it will have an interest to even try.

henry2023: We don’t even have fully automated driving cars despide a decade of heavy investment to this problem any random human can do at 16 years old.I’d image air control for a whole airport is even more complex than that, you can take any conclusion you’d like.

rl3: Only if it was Microsoft and entirely LLM-powered, because I trust their engineering:Clippy: "Cessna 123, cleared for takeoff runway two-seven."Cessna 123: "Cleared for takeoff runway two-seven, Cessna 123."[seconds later]Clippy: "Piper 456, cleared for landing runway niner. Where do you want to go today?"

altairprime: What video game on Steam allows me to practice air traffic control? How can I determine if I have a skill at the logistics of managing planes on a radar screen? Where can I join a multiplayer lobby where at game start we're assigned to either give radio commands to planes, or interpret radio commands and respond on behalf of planes, with at least two players for each? How does anti-griefing work in that environment?If that game existed, I would try it.Does it?

grumbelbart: > If you were to design an entire ATC system from scratch (pilot interfaces, sensors everywhere in the airport and planes etc) it can be automated.Even then you'll probably run into the long-tail distribution issues, similar to self-driving cars. 99.9% of all situations are pretty standard, but once in a while something so abstruse happens that it's not pre-programmed and requires some creativity to solve.> What you can probably do is create software which observes traffic and simulates it into the future and notifies the human ATCs about risks.Fully agree. Some of the recent close calls really were "obvious" much earlier, meaning they were not caused by late course changes.

HauntingPin: Honestly, it feels like RTS players might qualify considering how much multitasking is required in a game like Starcraft. Maybe they should add a StarCraft 2 competitive rank qualification.

giorgioz: After Theme Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_Park_(video_game) and Theme Hospital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_Hospital videogames now it's the turn of:THEME TRAFFIC CONTROLLER

saithound: MS Flight Simulator w/ VATSIM [1] l has this, in the sense thar you can take participate as a pilot or a controller, although you are not assigned these roles at game start.Anti-griefing works by keeping the barriers to entry very high, so chances are you won't try VATSIM, even though MSFS is technically available on Steam.[1] https://vatsim.net/docs/basics/becoming-a-controller

The ad also highlights the salary on offer to controllers, saying it is $155,000 (£115,000) after three years of work.

phoe-krk: Please correct me I'm wrong:> The ad also highlights the salary on offer to controllers, saying it is $155,000 (£115,000) after three years of work.Unless the US government shuts down again, at which point you stop being paid, you are required to keep working, you have no right to strike[0], and the competences you've built across this job are largely hard to directly make use of elsewhere so the incentive to job-hop is low.[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...

spwa4: No right to strike? So then we go back to playing high school games. Report in sick. Use one of the many tricks to actually be sick.

probably_wrong: I think people here may enjoy John Oliver's report on how bad the situation for air traffic controllers currently is.Jump to minute 18 for a discussion on floppy disks or, appropriately, to minute 25 for an "honest recruitment ad".https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YeABJbvcJ_k&t=1539

pjc50: This is why shutting down the right to strike is a short term approach: you can't make people choose to start or keep working in your sweatshop, so eventually you run out of staff.

phoe-krk: > you can't make people choose to start or keep working in your sweatshopIf you're a government, you can; it's called a draft. The US seems to be preparing for it.