One thing all aircraft have in common is that they must land at some point. If this point allows only 60 airplanes to land during a 1 hour period and 100 show up, what happens to the extra 40? To think that GPS can reduce this type of congestion is simplistic thinking. The only solution is increasing the aiport landing rate. How do we do this? You build more runways and airports. So lets put a new runway at LGA. Not so easy when you get down to it. Politics, bulidings, taking land, filling in wetlands, noise abatement concerns, money, and on and on we go. To put this example into terms that a Linux geek can understand is this: how can you improve your internet connection speed when you are using 14.4 relic modem? A new 1.33 ghz won't help much, a larger hardrive might help a little (increased caching space), more RAM--naah, even swithing to Red Hat 7.0 won't solve the problem. You need to eliminate the bottleneck at the 14.4 connection. A T1 would do the trick.
We simply can't build new runways and airports as we can get a T1 connection. So the current airspace problems will go unsolved with any new hardware/software solution. The airlines want all their flights to land at the same time so their clients will make connections onto "their" airplanes, not a competitor. It is called the "hub and spoke concept". Go to CLT and notice how many US Air airplanes you see, and how few United Airline airplanes there are, "hub and spoke" in action.
You must put a carbon monoxide detector in your house if you really think that "with an autonomous system, without human controllers, such fixed points... would be unnecessary". You forgot the Mang Bang mesobrain, the one fixed point that all aircraft must come to, the landing airport. Refer back to my first sentence. It is really not that complex of a concept to grasp.
As a current military trained commercial pilot, and a current Air Traffic Controller who has been "pushing tin" for over 19 years (it pays for my Linux habit), the thing that I find that sucks about the current system are small brained former pilots who think they have the big picture. Worse, small brain former pilots who make ignorant statements to non-aviation specilists just to satisfy their egos. Issuing a Private pilot liscense to some people is sort of like throwing a pack of matches into a monkey's cage, the results become, well umm, rather heated.
ps. hey mesobrain, what happened to those 40 aircraft that couldn't land?
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One thing all aircraft have in common is that they must land at some point. If this point allows only 60 airplanes to land during a 1 hour period and 100 show up, what happens to the extra 40? To think that GPS can reduce this type of congestion is simplistic thinking. The only solution is increasing the aiport landing rate. How do we do this? You build more runways and airports. So lets put a new runway at LGA. Not so easy when you get down to it. Politics, bulidings, taking land, filling in wetlands, noise abatement concerns, money, and on and on we go. To put this example into terms that a Linux geek can understand is this: how can you improve your internet connection speed when you are using 14.4 relic modem? A new 1.33 ghz won't help much, a larger hardrive might help a little (increased caching space), more RAM--naah, even swithing to Red Hat 7.0 won't solve the problem. You need to eliminate the bottleneck at the 14.4 connection. A T1 would do the trick. We simply can't build new runways and airports as we can get a T1 connection. So the current airspace problems will go unsolved with any new hardware/software solution. The airlines want all their flights to land at the same time so their clients will make connections onto "their" airplanes, not a competitor. It is called the "hub and spoke concept". Go to CLT and notice how many US Air airplanes you see, and how few United Airline airplanes there are, "hub and spoke" in action. You must put a carbon monoxide detector in your house if you really think that "with an autonomous system, without human controllers, such fixed points ... would be unnecessary". You forgot the Mang Bang mesobrain, the one fixed point that all aircraft must come to, the landing airport. Refer back to my first sentence. It is really not that complex of a concept to grasp.
As a current military trained commercial pilot, and a current Air Traffic Controller who has been "pushing tin" for over 19 years (it pays for my Linux habit), the thing that I find that sucks about the current system are small brained former pilots who think they have the big picture. Worse, small brain former pilots who make ignorant statements to non-aviation specilists just to satisfy their egos. Issuing a Private pilot liscense to some people is sort of like throwing a pack of matches into a monkey's cage, the results become, well umm, rather heated.
ps. hey mesobrain, what happened to those 40 aircraft that couldn't land?