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Designing Tomorrow's Air Traffic Control Systems
aarondubrow writes According to FAA estimates, increasing congestion in the air transportation system of the United States, if unaddressed, will cost the American economy $22 billion annually in lost economic activity by 2022. MIT researcher Hamsa Balakrishnan and her team are making air traffic control systems more efficient through a combination of better models and new embedded technologies. Testing their algorithms at Logan Airport in Boston, they showed that by holding aircraft back for 4.5 minutes, they could improve flow on the runways and save nearly 100 pounds of fuel for each aircraft.
Make sure the tower doesn't have software written by a company that went out of business, but still managed to get an update that can bring the whole thing down, and employ versioning in your datacenter backups...but if that doesn't work, ensure that copies of the software are uploaded to the planes themselves so that, in the event there's a group of socially awkward geniuses that can drive a Ferrari down a landing strip, they can download the software via an Ethernet cable and save everyone.
building in some redundant backups so that what happened in Chicago last month doesn't happen again?
1st this was done 4 years ago. The future is now.
But mostly...
Why were none of the tests more than 4 hours long? What happens after the test period, do they need to recover or something?
If this is so efficient why are we talking about a 4 year old test instead of the implementation 3 years ago?!?
The Economist has a great article on free-routing. Not only does this save time & fuel, but a "continuous descent approach" is also quieter at airports.