The Newark airport crisis

&gt; its implementation of a “NextGen” air traffic control system to replace the current version may not be completed until 2034, even though the project was started in 2003.<p>Governments (and a lot of businesses) like to look at software as a one-time purchase, but it&#x27;s really better too look at it as a liability and an ongoing cost. It&#x27;d be better to have a team make continuous, incremental improvements to the system than have &quot;NextGen&quot; last-gen replacement vaporware.

This is a classic system at 99.9% capacity - there’s no slack to take up issues or do anything but run at, well, 99.9%.<p>And without something like a major disaster, it’ll likely continue to get worse and worse.

Air travel is far too subsidized by the public and I can think of few worse applications of public funds save maybe sports stadiums. It&#x27;s a huge waste of energy, pollution, human labor...<p>Rail is incredibly efficient, and there&#x27;s a reason China has been building high speed rail as fast as it can.<p>To all the &quot;it would never work here&quot; people: we used to be a nation of rail travel, where you could walk or bike or take a taxi to the local trolley&#x2F;train&#x2F;bus station, take a train to where you needed to go.<p>All that was systematically ripped apart by the auto industry either directly or indirectly. There is no reason whatsoever we can&#x27;t work our way back, especially given how much faster and easier construction of a railway line is now.

i flew delta out of ewr last week. the pilot announced over speaker that air traffic control was serializing take offs on one runway to avoid problems. we sat on the tarmac for two hours waiting our turn. that was on top of another hour delay for our flight arriving due to this policy.<p>delta doesn’t reimburse for missed connections claiming air traffic control policies are outside of their control.<p>it reminds me of a dev team i worked with once which used single threaded memcache as a way to serialize inbound requests to a server with improper locking logic inside.

I&#x27;m in no way qualified to comment on the details of the issue outlined here (though I did get stuck babysitting a friend&#x27;s kids for many extra hours due to a 6hr delay on said friend&#x27;s flight into EWR a few weeks ago). For anyone who lives far enough north and west of EWR though, I highly recommend trying either the Allentown or Scranton&#x2F;Wilkes-Barre airports. I&#x27;ve moved my business travel to Scranton 100% and have been loving it. There are more restrictions on flight times, and basically everything needs a connection, but it more than makes up for any time I would have lost due to sinkhole traffic on I-80 and the EWR parking shuttles. It&#x27;s amazing to park and be at the security line basically 3 minutes later.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;9tLpI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;9tLpI</a>

&gt; To save money, the FAA elected not to build a new STARS server in Philadelphia to support the move. A new server alone would require tens of millions of dollars, as well as installation of new internet and power infrastructure.<p>&gt; Instead, it elected to send a “mirror feed” of telemetry from the STARS servers at N90, traveling over 130 miles of commercial copper telecom lines, with fiber optics to follow by 2030.<p>&gt; The annoyances of traditional cable internet — frequent lag, dropped sessions — are probably familiar to those who stream video or play games online. But for air traffic controllers, even the smallest service disruptions can become dangerous.<p>So LOL what, they just ... piped it over the Internet? Also can someone make sense of this &quot;new server&quot; costing millions of dollars? Presumably it&#x27;s not the cost of a server, which is orders and orders of magnitude less than that?

Need more trains.

It&#x27;s amazing, really. You hear about &quot;government overspending&quot; all the time. You actually look into something in any detail and what you discover is a consistent pattern of underspending. Call it mismanagement if you want, but it is consistently what we, as votes, and the executive, ask them to do.

An interim solution would be to force carriers to upsize their jets to reduce total flights per day. Force any carrier who has wide-body aircraft to use them on domestic routes. heavily limit or ban the use of smaller commuter jets (replace them with 737s with fewer total flights). I&#x27;m sure they won&#x27;t be happy about it, but it&#x27;s a solution that could be implemented overnight and the larger carriers would have no problem adjusting. smaller ones could sell their slots or lease larger aircraft.

I don&#x27;t understand this sentence:<p>&gt; Instead, it elected to send a “mirror feed” of telemetry from the STARS servers at N90, traveling over 130 miles of commercial copper telecom lines, with fiber optics to follow by 2030.<p>This does not make any sense. If they would really transmit data over a 130 miles copper line (which I doubt even still exist, especially not commercial ones), we would be talking rates in the low Mbit&#x2F;s. I suspect the situation is that the &quot;last mile&quot; of the center is served by copper connections, not good either but by far not as bad as a 130 miles copper connection.<p>EDIT: I should add if they really would have a link running on copper lines it would have repeaters, which would be sitting in datacenters. In New Jersey there would by 1000s of km of dark fiber floating around, so it would be trivial to convert at least the majority of the link to fiber.

It would have been easier and cheaper to raise the salaries of the Long Island employees.

It turns out trying to run an airport like twitter is a bad idea, who knew

We had a 9&#x2F;11&#x27;s worth of death EVERY DAY for the first TWO YEARS of covid<p>Then a 9&#x2F;11&#x27;s worth of death EVERY WEEK for the next TWO YEARS of covid<p>We still have a 9&#x2F;11&#x27;s worth of death EVERY MONTH in 2025<p>Personally I don&#x27;t want anyone to die in a plane crash<p>But apparently a hundred million other people do not care anymore about others dying needlessly<p>So factor that into your next flight if you are taking your life into your own hands?

What&#x27;s stopping us from implementing holo style 3d displays like in the movies? Star-Trek etc. Are we not there yet?? alternatively, what about VR? we could virtually project the traffic controllers out into space like silver-surfer or ironman right(pov of course)? I&#x27;m not an expert, but it seems we need a better UX&#x2F;UI right?