FAA Spending Nearly a Billion Dollars to Make AI "Brain" of Air Traffic Control

[rcjordan]

...Starting This Monday Sep 21
https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/faa-ai-air-traffic-control

^{Makes sense to Debbie, sorta like AI pharmacists and radiologists}

[Travoli]

My Youtube algo has been feeding me aviation mishap analysis videos. It's unsettling how often things go wrong. Luckily very few incidents result in injury or death.

[ergophobe]

> aviation mishap

I get a lot of those too. And I have no interest in aviation.

My dad was a fighter pilot for 20+ years. Every time the air traffic controllers would go on strike and complain about stress, he would say some version of: "Stress! You want to talk about stress. Stress is when the air traffic controller is bringing you in on instruments and you pop out of the clouds and you are headed straight into a mountain."

Which happened.

An ATC also mixed up his call sign and a TWA flight.  This would have been before 1965, so no idea if it has any relevance to the current ATC system. Anyway, the ATC wanted to put more space between them and told the TWA to climb and my dad to descend 1000 feet each. But since he mixed them up, they were at the same altitude. He said his radar operator (two-seater F-89) screamed and my dad looked up and for a split second he could make out the faces of passengers in the TWA as they passed 100 feet from it at 500mph.

The blips merged on the ATC screen, the controller screamed too and started desperately calling call signs into the radio. I imagine that as stressful as it was for my dad, the ATC responsible probably collapsed in a pool of sweat.

Anyway, I would hear a lot of stories like that. He retired from flying 50 years ago and the TWA incident still haunts him.

Those are old stories, but for every story of an unlucky situation that resulted in an accident, there are probably 50 that don't make the news because of dumb luck or quick reflexes.