News and notes from around the interweb:
- Here primarily for your safety: Virgin America’s flight attendants will vote this summer on unionization
- Innovate or die? That scary near-collision between a United 737 and an ExpressJet ERJ-145 last month. In many ways it amazes me that the manual process we use for air traffic control doesn’t lead to more problems than it does, and also that we still centralize air traffic control with such a human process.
- Innovation carries risks, too: Credit card chip and PIN vulnerabilities.
- Some things in life are (almost) free: How to earn miles buying gift cards and get the money back into your bank account.
- But alcohol should be free: Uber in London is delivering free Cuba Libre cocktails on demand tomorrow.
- Get your elite status for nothing and your double EQMs for free: Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan is offering double elite qualifying miles on all Salt Lake City flights between June 9 and August 1, and on nonstop Seattle – Detroit flights between September 2 and October 31. Registration required prior to travel. ::Delta:: ::cough:: ::Delta:
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Automating ATC is a very tricky problem. I have a friend whose academic research area of expertise is the design of automated methods for ATC. Clearly there are times where you need a human to be making judgments, so you can’t fully automate it. However, if you automate too much of it, the controllers get bored and out of practice. Thus, when you really need them, they make too many mistakes. On the other hand, if you don’t automate any of it, the controllers can get overwhelmed, making it hard to focus on the important parts while making sure the mundane stuff is also dealt with. Finding the sweet spot is not easy, but there are people working on it.
The challenge is that automation may or may not provide any measurable increase in safety. For example the system crash at LA center earlier in the year because 1 aircraft did someone outside the programmed parameters of the system.