America’s Air-Traffic Control System: An International Disgrace

We still don’t know how many mistakes led to the collision of a helicopter with an American Airlines passenger jet making its descent at Reagan National Airport last week. But one thing has been clear for decades: America’s air-traffic control system, once the world’s most advanced, has become an international disgrace. (...)

The problems were obvious 20 years ago, when I visited control towers in both Canada and the United States. The Canadians sat in front of sleek computer screens that instantly handled tasks like transferring the oversight of a plane from one controller to another. The Americans were still using pieces of paper called flight strips. After a plane took off, the controller in charge of the local airspace had to carry that plane’s flight strip over to the desk of the controller overseeing the regional airspace. It felt like going back in time from a modern newsroom into a scene from The Front Page.

It was bad enough to see such outdated technology in 2005. But they’re still using those paper flight strips in American towers, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s modernization plans have been delayed so many times that the strips aren’t due to be phased out until 2032. The rest of the system is similarly archaic. The U.S. is way behind Europe in using satellites to guide and monitor planes, forcing pilots and controllers to rely on much less precise readings from radio beacons and ground-based radar.

Overseas controllers use high-resolution cameras and infrared sensors to monitor planes on runways, but many American controllers still have to look out the window—which is why a FedEx cargo plane almost landed on top of another plane two years ago in Austin, Texas. It was a foggy morning, and the controller couldn’t see that a Southwest airliner was on the same runway waiting to take off. At the last minute, the FedEx pilot aborted the landing, missing the other plane by less than 100 feet.

The basic problem, which reformers have been trying to remedy since the Clinton administration, is that the system is operated by a cumbersome federal bureaucracy—the same bureaucracy that’s also responsible for overseeing air safety. The FAA is supposed to be a watchdog, but we’ve put it in charge of watching itself.

Nearly all other developed countries sensibly separate these roles, so that a federal aviation agency oversees an independent corporation that operates the control towers and the rest of the system, functioning as a public utility. (...)

In 2017, the Trump administration and Republican congressional leadership tried creating a similar system in the U.S., operated by a not-for-profit corporation. The bill was backed by some Democrats and by a broad coalition that included even the union representing air-traffic controllers, which had previously helped block reform but finally decided that this was the only way to fix the system. The legislation also enjoyed support from unions representing pilots and flight attendants, the major airlines, and a bipartisan array of former officials at the FAA and the Department of Transportation.

The bill went nowhere, partly because many legislators, especially Democrats, wanted to retain Congress’ control over the system—and the campaign contributions and pork-barrel opportunities that came with it. But the effort was doomed mainly because of opposition from private plane owners, who pay a pittance for the services they use. Though the legislation guaranteed that they would not be charged new user fees, their lobbyists scared enough lawmakers to quash it.

by John Tierney, City Journal |  Read more:

Image: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

[ed. If there's any system ripe for AI transformation, I'd say this would be Candidate No.1 (Pentagon auditing, No.2). After all, isn't managing complex systems in real time, streamling flight operations, providing total situational awareness 24/7 all something AI could do easily, even while watching Jeopardy and polishing its nails? We'll see. There are detractors:]

***

.... should they maintain the status quo to please the lobbyists representing owners of corporate jets?

If that choice doesn’t sound difficult, then you don’t know the power that corporate jet-setters wield in Congress. They’re the consummate Washington crony capitalists: shameless enough to demand that their private flights be subsidized by the masses who fly coach, savvy enough to stymie reforms backed by Democratic and Republican administrations.

While the rest of the industrialized world has been modernizing air-traffic control, the United States remains mired in technology from the mid-twentieth century. Controllers and pilots rely on ground-based radar and radio beacons instead of GPS satellites. They communicate by voice over crowded radio channels because the federal government still hasn’t figured out how to use text messaging. The computers in control towers are so primitive that controllers track planes by passing around slips of paper.

The result: an enormous amount of time wasted by passengers, especially those traveling in the busy airspace of the Northeast. Because the system is so imprecise, planes have to be kept far apart, which limits the number of planes in the air—leaving passengers stranded at terminals listening to the dread announcements about “air traffic delays.” When they do finally take off, they’re often delayed further because the pilot must fly a zig-zag course following radio beacons instead of saving time and fuel by taking a direct route.