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Why 40-Year-Old Tech Is Still Running America’s Air Traffic Control
On Friday, September 26, 2014, a telecommunications contractor named Brian Howard woke early and headed to Chicago Center, an air traffic control hub in Aurora, Illinois, where he had worked for eight years. He had decided to get stoned and kill himself, and as his final gesture he planned to take a chunk of the US air traffic control system with him. (www.wired.com) और अधिक...Sort type: [Top] [Newest]
Question: Is there gaps between ATC radar zones where a flight can literally disappear for a time? I sort of read that statement & had that in mind.
Yes, there exist 'holes' between zones. the obvious example, being in the middle of oceans. All radar has finite range, any time two antenna are farther apart than the sum of their range there is a gap in between. Picture a map with circles around radar stations. Out in the boonies, often in rarely traveled locations, it is easy to find gaps. I know of no gaps in high traffic density areas.
For the foreseeable future, if you purchase Wi-Fi in coach, you're pretty much better off than the pilot is an outrageous statement by the author and very misleading to the flying public. The National Airspace System isn't about one aircraft wanting to go direct to destination. The complexity is obviously over her head. Interesting...no mention of aviation weather like thunderstorms anywhere in the article or comments. Maybe we should just let computers deal with that also. BTW the National Bureau of Standards built the first Atomic Clock in Boulder, CO. (WWV) It's the heart of the GPS system. Not bad for the Feds.
Another way of looking at that statement is, if it is a regional airline and you can afford a ticket to fly, your income is probably higher than the pilots and thus 'better off'.
A lot of government offices in the USA still have no internet or email.
Post Offices have little or no tech except for scanners for bar codes. The government spends and spends on the military, everyone else gets crumbs.
So?
Why is the lack of new ATC such a big surprise.
Post Offices have little or no tech except for scanners for bar codes. The government spends and spends on the military, everyone else gets crumbs.
So?
Why is the lack of new ATC such a big surprise.
The above statement is just plain wrong. Sure it can handle only a limited amount of traffic. There will always be a limit in the ATC computer system, no matter how much it is improved in the future. Even the old system was designed to accommodate far more traffic than it will ever see.
The statement "can't see anything outside of their own airspace..." is false. Controllers have been able to see outside their own airspace since the 1960's, yes, the 60's. FAA handbook 7110.65 requires a controller to hand off a flight before it enters adjacent airspace in a radar environment. The sending controller starts a hand-off 10-15 nautical miles from the other controller's boundary. The gaining controller takes the hand-off while still in the other airspace. That is routine and has been going on thousands of times a day since the 1970's. There are some anomalous conditions that cause a track to vanish from the radar. Usually it is because the actual aircraft is long gone, and only a computer representation of the flight still exists. The controller can tell that there is no real aircraft there and when it vanishes from the radar, they are glad to see it go.
The whole aviation system is a victim of early adoption of computers and other technology. The radar beacon code system to help identify aircraft was digitized using four octal (0000 to 7777, no 8's or above) (0 to 4096 in decimal) so the number of unique beacon codes is very limited and facilities use those codes least likely to be used by their neighboring facility. Also, aviation radio got well established using AM radios in the 1930's or before. AM is really not bad since aircraft can communicate long distance with low power because their altitude provides good line of sight communication. If you want to change the system to FM just try it. The airlines and private owners world wide don't want the expense. It's not that broken.