U.S. air traffic control is antiquated. They’ve done a terrible job managing technology upgrades for several decades. Airspace is congested in the Northeast, so many processes are manual, and they don’t have enough people to manage the manual process. There are solutions, but those mostly get reject (like remote towers).
Credit where due, they’re moving control of Newark airport from Long Island to Philadelphia – but that’s just a workaround for an intransigent work group at the New York TRACON N90 facility, which keeps rejecting new controllers to preserve overtime.
Unlike in much of the world, the federal government doesn’t just regulate air traffic control it performs the service itself. That means they regulate themselves. And they do a bad job of it. Plus, they’re captive to annual congressional appropriations cycles which makes capital investment difficult.
Thought that the nationwide ground stop a year and a half ago – the first one since 9/11 – was bad when the FAA’s NOTAM system failed? They are still using paper flight strips. They’ve been trying to go electronic since 1983. And they won’t get most of the way even this decade, as transportation researcher Bob Poole notes:
On July 17, the Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report on the slow progress of FAA’s program to equip U.S. airport control towers with electronic flight strips (to replace traditional paper flight strips physically handed from one controller to another). The bad news is that instead of only 89 towers scheduled to receive this improvement by 2028, there will now be only 49 towers equipped by 2029.
Wait until you explain paper flight strips!https://t.co/fyU7aSILWr pic.twitter.com/gOBIHME3oK
— gary leff (@garyleff) July 2, 2023
The FAA set out a plan in 1983 “to equip 150 to 250 airport control towers by 2000.” They went way over budget and didn’t accomplish much. Most recently, a “contract with Lockheed-Martin (now Leidos) was to equip 89 towers with TFDM by 2028.” That’s been scaled back to 49 towers, but “only 27 of them will get the full version that includes surface management functions, while the other 22 will get only the electronic flight strips.”
They’ve cut airports including Honolulu, New Orleans, San Juan, Anchorage, Burbank, Hartford, Ontario, Orange County and Sacramento among others.
Meanwhile, all of Nav Canada facilities went electronic 15 years ago (and all control towers and TRACONs even earlier). Their solution is used in Australia, Italy, the U.K. and Dubai. We could license the Canadian solution, or other commercial ones, but instead the FAA has been working contracting for their own solution since three years before the Beastie Boys were fighting for your right to party.
Does this surprise anyone? The government is good at wasting money not solving problems just wasting money. Our government is incompetent.
For the most part, one less aspect that can be hacked.
The government is good at wasting money not solving problems just wasting money. Our government is incompetent.
I’m with you conceptually, but let’s not take it too far and pretend like Canadian, UK, Dubai, or (seriously now?) Australian airspace is in anyway comparable to US airspace. We have vastly more congestion, flight density, and therefore orders of magnitude more complexity than these other regions. The U.S. eastern seaboard alone is the single most congested flight corridor in the world. Complexity doesn’t increase linearly with congestion; it’s exponential. I don’t want to come off as if defending the U.S. federal government’s speed of innovation here, but the idea that U.S. airspace might require a different solution than elsewhere isn’t a far fetched one.
Doesn’t surprise me one bit.
There was a story from around 10 years ago the Sheldon Cohen who was LBJ’s IRS Commissioner paid a courtesy visit to the then current IRS commissioner and recognized the computer equipment that he had supervised the installation of in the 1960s.
Most casual observers consider the professionals entrusted with life safety matters – as exist in the FAA’ realm – to be incompetent until they recognize at the very least the importance of Alan Turing’s halting problem. Might very well be a concern when the solution sought needs to assess the potential for processing data with absolutely no errors.
antiquated just like most of its airports even the major ones
@Chas
You are wrong, the most congested airspace in the world is Europe where a long time ago they implemented the RVSM to allow planes twice as close as they are allowed in US.
If the US would implement the RVSM ATC systems, they will be able to double the traffic density right away but as it was said, the US government has never been here to solve any problem, just feeding taxpayer money to millions of useless beaurocrats.
To play devil’s advocate… on the bright side at least paper strips dont get the microsoft “blue screen of death” … there aren’t software glitches, screen failures, etc.
SOMETHING to be said for the paper strips….
I am retired FAA ATC who worked with both paper and electronic strips. Lots of issues here beyond just the difference between electronic and paper. Yes, FAA is cumbersome, often inefficient but I think does a great job with incredibly complex tasks. @Mike- we have used RVSM for about 20 years (don’t remember exactly) and that does improve traffic flow and flexibility but does not double capacity. Those planes still need to depart/arrive from the same airports that are space limited. I found electronic strips to offer some advantages but not a magic improvement. Lots of room for improvement at FAA but the safety record is exceptional.
@ Mike, RVSM has been in use for at least the last 20 years in the US. I’m not sure why you think that we don’t have it here.
If you have never worked in a busy Air Traffic Control Tower, you can’t realize how efficient the use of paper Flight Progress Strips (FPS) actually can be,