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FAA's Aging Flight-Plan System Having Problems
Eddytor takes us to eWeek for a look at the FAA's air-traffic control system, which, after 20 years of continuous operation, is in desperate need of an overhaul. Recent crashes have caused major delays, but the system's scope and importance make it difficult to test upgrades and improvements.
"Many technologies are used in air traffic control systems. Primary and secondary radar are used to enhance a controller's 'situational awareness' within his assigned airspace; all types of aircraft send back primary echoes of varying sizes to controllers' screens as radar energy is bounced off their skins. Transponder-equipped aircraft reply to secondary radar interrogations by giving an ID (Mode A), an altitude (Mode C) and/or a unique callsign (Mode S). Certain types of weather also may register on a radar screen."
I do wish TFS would make the distinction between software crashes and aircraft crashes.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
It doesn't need to make sense to me. If I handed a page of C++ to my grandmother, she couldn't make sense of that either. The weather report is concise and practical, giving a lot of information with the fewest amount of words. Once you can read it, you find it valuable to not have to sift through mounds of useless or redundant information (like adjectives, verbs, etc.)
Just because you can't read and understand it doesn't mean it doesn't have value to someone.
And what's that shit you posted at the end of your comment? Black People suck? Grow up, asshole.
, but the article doesn't give any real suggestions.
People probably won't like my suggestion, which would be to regulate air travel again. Cut the routes, limit take off and landing slots, increase the seat and isle widths and let airlines raise prices to the market level of support. Add a gas tax to keep the cost of gasoline above $3.50/gallon and take the money pay for building a high speed train system across the US. To me that would be worth going into debt for, short term anyway. It would create jobs here and give people an alternative to our broken air transportation system.
The trains could handle the commodity traffic and airlines could compete for luxury traffic, just like the old days. We have to do something. We have 3% of the world population and use 25% of the gasoline. Without alternatives we're never going to get people out of their cars. If I could go anywhere in the continental US in 24 hours, I'd never fly again.
With the added bonus of keeping air traffic at a predictable level for the FAA.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It's pretty apparent that the current system isn't up to the task. I think the real questions should be more along the lines of upgrade or redesign? and in-house engineered versus contractor engineered? I hear there is a replacement on the way, but is it an actual 1 to 1 replacement or is it just replacing a few machines but the heart of the system is some old POS box that's been running since 1988? (I've seen other government networks receive upgrades like this)
Given the vast scale of the system, the constant use, and the time it would take to retrain all of the operators, how would you start testing and implementing new hardware? Just continue running the same code on new hardware... providing a few software tweaks to allow it to scale? Just how old is the current system? DOS era computing? CTOS? ENIAC?
greed@All_Evils:~#
I recently graduated from an aviation program at Purdue and I can tell you every single person I've ever sat down in a classroom with can read METARs, TAFs, and any other weather report just as quickly as if they were reading plain english.
More horseshit. I see cars on the side of the road almost daily on my commute. How often do you see a plane fall out of the sky because the engine died?
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Thanks for that, I bet the FAA guys will really appreciate it. They were just going to plug the new system in and hope that it worked, but your novel idea of "testing" could literally be a life saver.
The last time the FAA decided to do a major overhaul, they got a little too ambitious. They awarded a $4.5 billion contract to IBM to produce the Advanced Automation System, a complete replacement of the antiquated air traffic control system. The project was to begin with a major overhaul of the ATC workstations and human interface, looking at all the ideas engineers and air traffic controllers had to make the system better and safer. After 2 years IBM had blown through $2 billion and the only thing they had really accomplished was to replace the 1960s-vintage hardware with more recent gear. It was clear that it would take >$15 billion and >10 years to complete the project at the rate they were going, so the FAA cancelled the rest of the project. The less expensive $500 million version in Canada (CAATS, awarded to IBM's unsuccessful competitor Hughes Aircraft), was no more successful. Lesson learned: ATC system are *complicated*. They require near 100% reliability, and human lives depend on them. When they fail (as they must always do eventually), human controllers must be able to smoothly and safely pick up the entire workload in mid-flight, and then smoothly transition back to computer control when possible. Designing and implemnting this system is a challenge comparable to going to the moon.
People, especially here in the US, are independent creatures. They prefer personal transportation to mass, and personal right now happens to be gas.
While people do often like their cars, as a person who has traveled by bus(both city and greyhound), train, plane, taxi, and car I have to say that there are reasons for so many people being almost glued to their vehicles.
To Wit: The alternatives suck. And the old saying: time costs money
For commutes, you're stuck using their schedule, not your schedule. When I had a *free* bus available, I mostly drove to work. Why? Because my work, despite being the one providing the bus, set the bus schedules in a paranoid fashion, resulting in adding 2 hours to my 12 hour work day. If it's simply added a half hour, I'd have taken it. The $2-4 saved back then just wasn't worth the time.
So, in any proposal to actually get people out of their cars, you have to acknowledge this. If you can make your theoretical public transport faster, cheaper, and more reliable than a car, you'd easily be able to get a large number of cars off the road.
That's why I like the idea of a high speed PRT system - you get the system's average speed above that of cars and a ticket that costs less than the gas to drive the same distance and you're gold. For an inner city system that'd often be 25-35 mph, for a interstate type system I'd want 100mph at a minimum*.
relax regulations on battery technology
Specifics?
*And a way to keep the same car when you stop to use the bathroom or even eat at a restaurant.
and allow more nuclear power plants
I agree with you here, but this reminded me of a local politician campaign add talking about 'adding more wind power to reduce our dependence on foreign oil'. I don't mind green energy by any means, but I detest fuzzy logic. Wind turbines produce electricity. Electricity, at this time, is insignificantly tied to our demand for oil. We could triple our electricity production and cut the cost in half and we'd barely reduce our demand for oil. At that, it'd be mostly people in the northeast switching from oil heating to electric. And they're already switching away from oil in many cases.
I don't read AC A human right
"TCAS isn't so much "in flight radar" as it is "holy shit last minute saver of your ass". TCAS doesn't do anything until a collision is basically imminent, at which point it gives instructions on how to avoid said collision."
Uh, Not quite. The system provides two warnings to the pilot- a TA (Traffic Alert), where the software recognizes an aircraft in proximity to your plane which may become a potential problem,
and,
an RA (Resolution Advisory), where the algorithm identifies an aircraft whose flight path and altitude are in direct conflict with your aircraft, and issues a climb or descent instruction.
Even now, the system is not perfect, but I've personally seen more RA's on a non-conflicting , known aircraft than the reverse, your "last-minute Holy Shit" as quoted above.
My experience? 26 years ATC, with 80% of that time at busy terminals (approach/departure control).
Just my two cents.
First let me say, I am no friend of the FAA. Everything in life is is a trade off between cost and risk. Everything. Period. In many cases, unless you're willing to pay $10,000 for your next coach plane ticket, many "fixes" are simply not cost effective given its low risk of occurrence.
Having said that, the FAA, as it relates to GA, is directly responsible for everything costing 2x or more than it should. They are also responsible for maintaining, if not elevating risk in many areas. Free market competition is vary rare for almost all aspects of GA aviation. Attorneys are directly responsible for all things GA aviation related costing a factor of 2 more than they should, in addition to the FAA's overhead.
If people really want to increase aviation safety, half the size of the FAA, require a pilot license to head the FAA, double the number of inspectors for commercial operators, and force a revamp of the certification process. As is, the FAA is directly responsible for keeping newer, safer, smaller, lighter technologies out of most cockpits and engine bays. Remember, it's a question of cost and everything aviation related is inflated 4x-8x higher than it would be if free market forces and liability protection would be allowed to function.
You are right about one thing, in many cases of aviation accidents, the FAA does have blood on its hands.
In more recent times, the spectre of the TSA has raised its head and is now starting to negatively impact aviation safety with no return on public safety. Does anyone remember the B2 bomber crash? Turns out some moister was the cause, inside some instrument pitot tubes. Now imagine TSA agents wilfully damaging the same types of instrumentation on commercial airliners in the name of public safety inspections; which are impossible to improve public safety. Recently, as many as 10 aircraft were ignorantly sabotaged by TSA inspectors in the name of public safety by climbing up onto the aircraft, on these very sensitive pitot tubes. Thankfully a pilot noticed some abnormalities and aborted his takeoff. Now keep in mind, it is impossible, regardless of the damage created, for these types of inspections to improve public safety.
Don't be fooled, the TSA is fighting hard to "get into the cockpit" and I have no doubt, public safety will continue to be compromised unless the public is educated on the dangers the TSA's well meaning yet ignorantly harmful involvement will cause. It's only a matter of time.
That's ridiculous, and a sign of complete stagnation on your part. How about we either fix the system, or design a better one? The answer is not to stagnate, but instead to build again!
Telling people to return to trains is ridiculous, and who has time for that anyway? If the air system isn't safe, fix it. If it can't be fixed, then build a better one. There is nothing that people in the 80's could do that we shouldn't be able to equal, if not vastly exceed. They weren't magicians, and their technology was far less advanced than what we have been able to create in the intervening two decades.
Where do I even start with this? Here are just a few of the many things wrong with this statement:
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Ever been a pilot?
As a pilot, unless I cannot communicate with ATC I don't want to have yet another system to monitor. Cruise flight is not where the problem is, it is approach and departure and in those phases of flight I am one busy MoFo and I don't have time to stare at yet another screen full of mostly useless information, since I am busy flying the fucking plane.
Technology has come a long way, I don't have to constantly scan the engine instruments because they have warning lights and buzzers and whatnot that will get my attention if something starts to go south. If I am making a visual approach my eyeballs are looking OUTSIDE, if I am making an instrument approach my eyes are scanning the primary flight instruments, not a screen telling me there are 43 other aircraft doing the exact same thing I am doing.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
I used to design air-traffic control systems.
The title and text of the parent post are inconsistent. The article is about the failures and obsolescence of the flight-plan system, but the discussion of radars, etc, in the text of the post is about other parts of the air-traffic control system. The flight-plan system interfaces to the part of the system that synthesizes radar data and allows communication from controllers to aircraft, but it is not that system. The reason for the interface is so you can do correlation of observed aircraft ID data, positions and position history with flight plans that have been filed. Then, if a plane goes off its flight path, the controllers can warn them and start emergency measures, which includes handing off to the air force.
The amount of data in a flight plan is pretty small, and the volume of messaging is on the order of a few million per year. Conceptually, NADIN is little more than a guaranteed-delivery email system. Next time they build the system they should consider routing over the Internet (of course using encryption) as a backup communication path. And there's also a huge amount that's been learned about system redundancy and scalability in the past few decades. The 99.9% uptime mentioned in the article is piss-poor for such a critical system. That's 8.76 hours per year of downtime. I delivered military systems in the 80's that had far better uptime. It wasn't even good in its own time.
I worked on both military and civilian air traffic control systems. The FAA and their consultants I met had that dangerous combination of arrogance and pig-ignorance that makes failure inevitable. They knew next to nothing about user interfaces, and had worse understanding of engineering tradeoffs than the average private sector middle manager (and that's pretty bad). By contrast, a good percentage of US Air Force officers involved in ATC actually knew what they were talking about. The FAA controllers I met were also shockingly ignorant of the capabilities and limitations of their systems, and some of their processes were there for historic reasons that no longer made sense. It was like dealing with overpaid DMV counter staff. It scares the hell out of me that people's lives depend on decisions that these knuckleheads make.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
We have 3% of the world population and use 25% of the gasoline.
We use 25% of the world's gasoline, and produce 25% of the world's gross product (2007 numbers, from multiple sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) )
As long as we continue to be that productive, we'll probably use a pretty sizable chunk of resources, too.
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca
Interesting. There are quite a lot of auto conversions running around in the homebuilt community and they typically have TBO's in the range of 1500-2000 hours. And Engine failure, while slightly more common than in your standard Lycoming/Continental crowd, still happens very rarely. Especially considering most of these engines are homebuilt from parts kits and not professionally maintained I think that's a very good track record.
Honestly the whole "certified" engine issue is really holding GA back. A 40+ year old Conty design can run for 2000 hours while A modern automotive engine can run for 10,000 or so with very poor maintenance and in harder conditions. (how often do you put your ga engine through constant cycles of full throttle acceleration and sudden deceleration with no warmup time)
I think Rotax is on the right track, but they need to go further. EFI, Modern variable ignition, and liquid cooling would all benifit aviation immensely. Plus if you move them out of the space where a 100hp engine costs $30,000 to replace you can make aviation more available to all.
Trains? Sorry, but the train era ended around 1970. After it was decided that trains were no longer profitable, they tore up the tracks and sold the land off.
Today, if you take the train, you will find that passenger service has to wait on sidings until the track (just one left) is cleared because freight is also using it and is more important. On the east coast there are some train lines left with some passenger service tracks, but that is the exception to the rest of the country.
Nobody is going to build any high speed rail lines except in a very few places where they can somehow buy back the right-of-way or just add a track to an existing freight corridor. A nationwide rail system was built before 1950 and allowed to deteriorate completely. It was sold off as scrap metal. I don't see anyone being able to rebuild it now.
Underground tunnels? Sure, but where would the labor come from? At OHSA prices we'd all be better off walking, even from New York to Chicago.
There are quite a lot of auto conversions running around in the homebuilt community and they typically have TBO's in the range of 1500-2000 hours.
This is true, with a caveat. Most engines are not used simply because they weigh far too much. The list of engines which are often put into home builds AND which have a good safety record is actually a pretty short list. In fact, these engines are both prized and hard to come by. If you look at the RV crowd, those that don't do Lyc 320 or 360s hunt for cores dating back to the 50s and 60s. At this late date, you can imagine they're getting scarce. These select few engines do not accurately reflect the huge variety of engines available to car manufacturers. And this should certainly come as no surprise as cars share little of the same constraints which airplane builders must address.
Honestly the whole "certified" engine issue is really holding GA back.
No argument from me on this. I completely agree.
A 40+ year old Conty design can run for 2000 hours while A modern automotive engine can run for 10,000 or so with very poor maintenance and in harder conditions. (how often do you put your ga engine through constant cycles of full throttle acceleration and sudden deceleration with no warmup time)
While the operating life your present is accurate, the operating conditions are not. GA aircraft must sustain far higher MPs, far widers spreads in temps, hot spots, large quantities of cold fuel pushed in from ham-fisted pilots (the true cause of mythical shock cooling), and high operating temps with limited cooling capacities. In the long run, car engines get a daily picnic compared to what GA engines go through; and doublely so if it is used for training.
Most automotive engines which are run as hard as GA aircraft engines either fail vastly premature or are rebuilt on a regular basis. In fact, about the only thing comparable here in treatment are race engines, which are often rebuilt after each race or after each race season, depending on the sport.
Eliminating the user mixture control would allow the pilot (student pilots especially) to focus more on flying the airplane than tuning mixture for best economy. It would also reduce the wear and tear on an engine from improperly leaning the mix.
It's only a $20,000 - $40,000+ option, depending on your engine and airframe. This assumes you're in the market for a retrofit. You can imagine owners are jumping right on that. ;)
Modern ignition could allow for more power in a more reliable system than magnetos. CDI units are largely bulletproof anymore and will frequently run the life of the engine without maintenance. A backup magneto system can be present in case of electrical failure.
More and more modern aircraft are getting this feature but it has its downside. A DA-42's accident, which is a twin, was traced back to ignition failure. Seems the battery was not charging. When the pilot retracted the electric gear on departure, the voltage dropped below the required threshold to operate the electronic ignition. Both engines died simultaneously. The pilot died. I don't remember if he had passengers or not.
Needless to say, there is still room for the ultra reliable magneto, dual mag setup of conventional designs.
Liquid cooling would eliminate the need for concern about shock cooling (thermostats are good things) and would reduce the amount of worry about exhaust gas entering the cockpit through the muffler shroud for the heater.
Liquid cooling adds weight and load on the engine. A coolant leak means a scrubbed flight. A water pump is yet one more component which can fail. Many pilots already elect to remove their A/C. How many you think are willing to reduce their useful load and reduce their available HP in exchange for creating an additional, likely, and costly maintenance item? Not many. This is one of the reasons Rotax engines are considered to be a real mixed bag.
Also, shock cooling is a myth. If it were real, it would be a noteworthy statics for twins and especially for twins used for primary training. No such statistic exists. The myth of shock cooling is believed to be answered by pilots who rapidly adjust the mixture and throttle controls, causing large quantiles of very cold aviation fuel and air to be dumped into very hot cylinders. Ham-fisted pilots are to blame, not throttle pulls and descents.
Check out Deakin's Pelican Brief articles for more on the subject. Sorry, I don't remember the name of the article.
Honestly nothing is more pathetic than the "heater" in a 172.
I couldn't agree with you more.
Happy flying.