Kind of curious how air traffic control evolved in other countries, and how the international flight system works with handoffs between countries, particularly in Europe and the Caribbean where national borders tend to be relatively small.
Re WWII use of radio:<p>My grandfather flew Typhoons, and they operated 'cab rank' as part of the 2nd Tactical Air Force. The Army would radio in coordinates of German tanks or fortified positions, and the Typhoons would come in with their rockets / bombs / cannons. I wish he was still around so I could ask him how that was done. A central dispatcher? Or did they talk to the Army directly? Not sure.
An interesting parallel to the Air Force's SAGE was the Navy's NTDS, Naval Tactical Data System. It had to do much the same as SAGE, with target correlation and the like, and had to do it from moving ships (and later with the E-2 Hawkeye Airborne Tactical Data System from planes as well). Purely military, and I can't tell that many of its developments ever ended up in civilian society like elements of SAGE did, but it's remarkable just how much they could do with the technology of the time.<p>The best source I've seen about NTDS itself is <a href="https://ethw.org/First-Hand:No_Damned_Computer_is_Going_to_Tell_Me_What_to_DO_-_The_Story_of_the_Naval_Tactical_Data_System,_NTDS" rel="nofollow">https://ethw.org/First-Hand:No_Damned_Computer_is_Going_to_T...</a> while Norman Friedman's book _Fighters Over the Fleet_ talks about the fighter control context around NTDS, like what the system was before NTDS, the factors that caused the previous system to break down, and parallel British efforts at the same problem
Hi author, I love your blog, but could you add a toggle option to disable the background image? I end up going to Chrome Devtools and disabling the CSS rule.<p>I suppose the PDF is a good workaround for now.
This piece hit hard. It’s strange how something so invisible to most of us is simultaneously one of the most complex, tightly-coupled systems running in the background of daily life.
The historical perspective is kind of interesting. What interests me more is how this stuff can be modernized. Because the current byzantine system of task saturating people by making them yell numbers and letters at each other over state of the art 1950s technology for doing so is hardly efficient, scalable, or ultimately secure when it inevitably breaks down under the stresses it induces on pilots and staff involved.<p>Communication failures and pilot errors are usually major contributing factors to accidents. Pilot errors become more likely when individuals are preoccupied with processing vast amounts of information and demands thrown at them via radio in critical parts of flight (e.g. when finding their way to a runway).<p>Most of the radio calls today (>95%) are bog standard verbal exchanges about things that should not require any humans in the loop. Anything to with weather is just numbers that can and should be be exchanged digitally. Much faster, less room for error. There should be zero confusion about what the altimeter settings are at a particular airport, what the active runway is, where the wind is coming from, etc.<p>Anything to do with "who are you and why are you here", which is a disturbingly large proportion of verbal exchanges, sounds like it could be established both more securely, robustly, and efficiently. We have computers now with things like secure hashes, uuids, certificates, etc. Any time you have enough bandwidth to talk to somebody you definitely have enough bandwidth to throw quite a bit of data around securely and reliably.<p>If you call your granny via whatsapp, facetime, or whatever, there's no need to tell her who you are. Because the app tells her before she even answers. It's completely redundant information. She already knows. There's no valid technical reason why ATC cannot have the same comfort of knowing who they are talking to and what they are flying. It's 2025! Not 1965. ATC should have full context when they talk to people. They shouldn't have to ask for that context verbally. Routine course changes, altitude changes, etc. could be communicated and confirmed via computers. Voice channels should be used for emergencies and non standard situations only.<p>There are a few things happening in aviation that are making this more urgent after many decades of stagnation in technological changes. Battery electric is going to make flying vastly cheaper and safer than it is today. That's going to increase the amount of relatively inexperienced pilots and plane movements. And secondly, there are an increasing amount of autonomously flying planes, drones, etc. Those are actually going to dominate traffic in the years ahead. Pilots are expensive and are becoming kind of redundant. The amount of flights that ATC needs to juggle is going to increase by at lease one or two orders of magnitude.<p>The current system won't scale with that, it will have to change. Now would be a good time to start figuring that out.