Please fasten your seatbelts. A third of US air traffic control systems are 'unsustainable' Over a third of the USA’s air traffic control systems are in an “unsustainable" state, and the FAA's decades-long project to upgrade them is not going well. That concerning situation was described on Tuesday by the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) in testimony to the House committee on transportation and …
(I don't know how runway numbering works, so pretend those names make sense)
They do. Just thought I'd reply because I didn't know either how these were numbered and it's surprisingly simple. They just lop off the last 2 digits from the compass heading and put L or R for left or right after it if there's 2 paralell runways. So a runway angled 270 degrees would be runway 70 and the opoosite direction would be 90 degrees so runway 90.
"So a runway angled 270 degrees would be runway 70 and the opoosite direction would be 90 degrees so runway 90."
So what happens when there's one at 270 and one at 70? Who gets to be 70a and who is 70b? :-)
The flight suit ------------>
(No, I don't fly, I'm just cosplaying)
Nope. Runways are numbered by their magnetic heading, truncated to the nearest 10 degrees. So a runway with heading 270 would be number 27. For parallel runways, append L, C or R (Left, Center or Right).
Approaching in the opposite direction, add (or subtract) 180 degrees and truncate. So heading Southwest, you'd be assigned runway 22. To land on the same asphalt strip heading Northeast, you'd get runway 4.
Correct, sir. I'll add, in case anyone's interested, that runways are generally aligned so as to face into the prevailing winds for the area. For instance, in the SF Bay Area airports, with which I'm most familiar, most runways are designated plus/minus 30 (300deg magnetic),as the prevailing winds are from the northwest. In the northern hemisphere, low pressure cold fronts move west to east and their wind travels counter-/anti-clockwise about the low, due to Coriolis Effect, so with an approaching front the 'active' will be switched to the opposing runway (e.g. runway 12).
Numbering is in tens of degrees, counted clockwise from north. e.g. Due north is 0. Due east is 90. With parallel runways, you have Right and Left. And, just to make things interesting, if you come from the opposite direction, the number will be offset by 18 (180 degrees). So runway 9 becomes runway 27.
"22L" would be a runway oriented at 220 degrees (where North is 0 degrees), and it's the left-hand one of a pair pointed that way. Similarly, "10L" would be the left-hand runway oriented to 100 degrees, and "7R" the right-hand one oriented at 70 degrees.
I *think* I recall a publicized event involving runway 22L at Boston's Logan International Airport, back in the 1970's. (Or maybe that's must my brain continuing to degrade.)
I've been hearing about the sad state of the American ATC system for as long as I can remember. Why don't they just buy one? Other countries have more modern versions. Although with dementia Don's diplomatic ineptitude it's likely that the only country willing to help them out would be russia
"Why don't they just buy one?"
Federal acquisition rules. Things have to be put out for bid. If some vendor doesn't receive a bid invitation, throw out everything and start again. If some vendor doesn't like the specifications because (they claim) it somehow favors a competitor, throw out everything and start again. If some vendor loses and takes the whole thing to court, throw out everything and start again. Etc.
Do NOT spec a "next generation", cloud-resident, AI-"assisted" system.
Spec a system with the feature-set of the current system, with local-to-the-airport computer residency, comms to the rest of the ATC systems, redundancy with auto-failover/recovery. Use modern COTS computer hardware and interfaces, no "Dell-proprietary", "HP-proprietary", etc. power supplies, motherboards, cables, connectors, video standards, or form factors. (COTS radar units might be harder.)
But that's not how big-ticket government systems procurement happens.
(Icon for [Washington, D.C.] "Beltway Bandits".)
You vastly underestimate just how complex ATC systems are and how many (likely poorly documented) local fixes, functions and protocols exist that make such an endeavor a challenge and a half. Anything "AI" should clearly be off the table to begin with. As for "no proprietary anything", yeah... good luck with that. The joy of standards is that there's just so many to choose from. Good luck getting everything in exactly the combination of "most used" standards for a decent price. Sometimes a vendor specific "proprietary" standard IS the better choice if it's a standard so widely used the vendor is unlikely to run out of reasons to have spares at a decent cost any time soon.
Sometimes a vendor specific "proprietary" standard IS the better choice if it's a standard so widely used the vendor is unlikely to run out of reasons to have spares at a decent cost any time soon.
Running out of stocks of a proprietary part is SoP. It even has a name: planned obsolescence.
"Running out of stocks of a proprietary part is SoP. It even has a name: planned obsolescence."
On the other hand, it's why Govt (and especially military) systems and hardware cost so much. They demand contracted spares for the "life" of the system, however long that may be.
A (small) part of my job involves some military IT kit. It's old. Spares are available from stock, parts you will often not find on fleabay because the kit is so old and has been out of general support for a decade or two. That stock is reserved for that customer only and wherever possible, exchanges are repaired and placed back into stock, including whole items, boards and even just stripped down failed units for anything useful on them. And the OEM still makes the consumables because they have to. That's also in the contract.
I do *not* underestimate how complex these systems are. I am smart-enough to know that I have *no idea* how complex these systems are.
As to local fixes, I would not be surprised to learn airport X has a Compaq 8088-based luggable PC sitting in a corner, running MS-DOS and some Kermit scripts to send and fetch files via modem.
As to proprietary hardware, if enough 3rd parties support a thing, it moves from "proprietary" to "quasi-proprietary", or even, "defacto industry standard". The Altair computer bus, aka "S-100", and the Centronics parallel interface, aka "IEEE-1284" are two examples. I consider such multiple-3rd-party-supported things acceptable.
Yet it seems to me the only wiggle-room the FAA has to reduce the cost and time involved is to make the requirements sufficiently-simple and straight-forward, and to make requirements for COTS hardware such that the Big Names in the business won't want to bother with lobbying/bribing/bidding on the thing, as it won't meet their desired (ginormous) profit margins.
Just don't scrap that Compaq LTE 5280 laptop. I need it to maintain my McLaren F1.
Dad once work on an ATC in the UK. IIRC he said he was there six months just woring up the interconnect from $major_London_ATC site to the next door military site. It's not something where you can pop in during the quiet very early morning hours and rip out the old kit and install he new kit. You need a whole new building, train the staff up on it as it becomes usable, and then run in parallel in a phased switch over. About the only way to make it cheaper would be to mandate and change freeze a standard system design and then roll that out at every location.
I'm also surprised they didn't pursue 'implement the same under emulation on new hardware.'. But it does divert plans from the new system with new features that the agencies ALWAYS seem to assume will finish on schedule even when they're olanned to take 20 years.
As for standard parts... they may be using them. But for 40 or 60 year old systems that doesn't help. My friend worked at the NRAO radio telescope (he's retired now) and some of those systems use standard (for 1980s) VME bus, which was pledged to have decades of support,. And it did! But the remaining new old stock ran out about 15 years ago. Try to find ISA cards. Try to find a PCI (not PCI express) video card for that matter. And then add to that that the FAA probably has bespoke interfaces (for high reliability and so on.)
Ooh, VME bus. A place I worked for had a client with a VME bus based computer w/Motorola 88K CPU, running Unix and doctors'' office management software under it.
Too bad VME bus cards are so rare ... as are S-100/Altair bus cards, floppy diskettes, ... etc. You'd think *someone* would make new cards to support old equipment ...
> You'd think *someone* would make new cards to support old equipment ...
A company with a delightfully retro website makes PDP-11 emulator cards for PCs just in case your city's traffic lights, water treatment plant of nuclear power plant runs on the same extremely obsolete hardware that was cutting edge when it was built
Despite your username. Or if you have it was a tiny fraction of the scope they're talking about, and it was in a single site or two not spread in a thousand plus sites across the US, with interdependence on foreign sites around the world that you don't control.
Because if you had you wouldn't suggest that as if it is so easy to do. Especially the part about "feature set of the current system". That won't be documented anywhere. It can only be inferred by watching how people who use the system use its various features (and unintentional features, aka bugs) and you better have a really large sample size because if you miss a few things only a few people use (but may be super critical) you won't implement them.
You'd also encounter massive pushback as people would say "if we're going to have go through all this hassle, relearn a different way of accomplishing the same tasks etc. can you please add this one or two minor things that would make my job much easier" (and you'll have a list of hundreds of such "minor things" after talking to everyone)
There's a reason why these sorts of projects always go awry, and you end up with outcomes like SAP migrations that cost 10-15x the original projections and take years longer planned. It has nothing to do with government being inefficient, it has to do with technical debt, lack of documentation, and in some cases lack of source code.
... that has been ordered by the current Government to dig up enough money to pay Starlink so they can drop the "wasteful" contract they have with Verizon?
Yes, kiddies, Elon Musk has apparently ordered the US government to pay one of his companies 2.2 billion dollars to provide comms. for the FAA, and to do it immediately (if not sooner). So the FAA is scrambling to pile up enough loot (in the tens of millions of dollars) with the money "saved" by the recent firings in order to pay off Verizon to get out of the existing contract ... All for a system that has never been tested with something the size and complexity of the FAA.
And here I thought DOGE and Elon were supposed to be getting rid of fraud, graft, corruption, wasteful spending and etc. within the .gov?
Silly me ... That would be except for President Elon, the Court Jester Trump, and the villiage idot Vance's pet projects. Of course.
Yes, but that doesn't matter. fElon Muskrat want to replace an existing system with one that is manufactured by his own company, with the concomitant stuffing of his personal pockets with those self-same "taxpayer funds" that he so laughing bleats that he is "saving".
All in the name of reducing "waste, fraud, and abuse" (all the while performing those same three things himself).
"One rule for me, another for thee!"
What, none of the usual suspects here spouting off about "DEI"?!
Colour me surprised. Or maybe even they recognise this is decades of resource starvation in the making.
And no, the recent "flurry" of incidents is not a result of outdated ATC in the US, rather just the usual feeding frenzy of MSM and their ability to understand statistics (or stochastics, rather)
The only time DEI is an issue is when different standards apply because of a person's background, such as universities requiring different SAT scores to get in based on which group a student belongs to. This case went to the US Supreme Court where this policy was struck down.
Right. If a member of a minority group cannot get the required SATs, he should do it the old-fashioned way and hire a friend to take the test for him.
Or the new-fashioned way: get a diagnosis of ADHD and have half again or double the time to take the test. Curiously these diagnoses are much more common in the better-off part of town, which is not to say a minority-heavy part.
"The only time DEI is an issue is when different standards apply because of a person's background,"
The "standard" might also be that they have boxes to tick that don't have "white", "male" or "hetrosexual" in their descriptions that would allow them to hire whomever is the best or just a good fit for the position.
For those interested in details of this topic, the Reason Foundation provides interesting backgrounds to the state of the FAA and how they are stuck in pre-historic times. It is not just the infrastructure, but also the way they are organised.
Knowing ElReg, probably a combination of all of the above.
And also a poke at the ignorant MAGA[0] cult members who put trump into power ... Most of that set pronounce "difficult" words incorrectly.
(Back in mid 2018 I wrote I had a guy accusing me of "using eminence grease" to speed up the building of a bridge on my property. Used the term five or six times. Seems he was upset that he wasn't allowed to build a similar bridge to make accessing his property a trifle easier ... never mind that my bridge lands on my property on both sides, but the creek he wants to cross is the property line between himself and city owned property. He's a bit of a nutter, so I just nodded & carried on with what I was doing, and eventually he left. It's kind of hard to talk over a tractor when the operator has no interest in what you are saying. It wasn't until after he was gone that I realized he meant " éminence grise".)
[0] Muppets Annoying Genuine Americans
They'll likely just cook the books to make them look good to to the economically ignorant Elonald and its sycophants/quislings/worshipers.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has already stated he's planning on "messing with the GDP", to make things look more favo(u)rable to the administration. He won't be able to make it rise to any great degree, but he'll probably be able to make it flatline instead of nosediving ... and then Elonald will blame "the remnants of Bidenomics" for the lack of growth.
"They'll likely just cook the books to make them look good to to the economically ignorant Elonald and its sycophants/quislings/worshipers."
To be fair, I think that fiddling GDP numbers has been going on for a long while. According to official figures, US GDP per capita is double that of Europe. Does anybody want to claim that US citizens have either double the wealth, the earnings, the lifestyle of Europeans? But I suspect you're right, the numbers will now be fiddled even more so that government of traitors can boast about how much winning they're doing.
I feel so sorry for the half of the US that didn't vote for the fat, lying bully; The US was indeed a great country, with many faults but overall a positive and stabilising influence globally. Now it's being systematically dismantled and defiled in every possible way, as quickly as possible. Far from MAGA, it's Make America The Laughing Stock of the World. Will MATLSOTW fit on a Chinese made baseball cap?
Out of curiosity, is there any hint of reflection, or buyer's remorse from those who voted for the Grand Orange Party?
According to official figures, US GDP per capita is double that of Europe.
Some of that GDP comes from the artifically inflated cost of internal trade, such as the high prices American clinics and hospitals have to pay for pharmaceuticals patented and manufactured by American corporations, or the excessively convoluted requirements made for the maintenance of defence materiel by Lockheed and Boeing, such as the F-35 fighters or the Minuteman-3 ICBMs.
> Out of curiosity, is there any hint of reflection, or buyer's remorse from those who voted for the Grand Orange Party?
We're seeing onesie-twosie sorts of stories about people regretting having their own faces eaten after voting for the Leopards Eating People's Faces party. But still only a few stories floating around. It's hard to say whether the light is actually dawning generally.
We were encouraged to see the results of a few Republican Congress member (House and Senate) 'Town Halls' with the public invited to a more or less informal meeting with the incumbent. The results were very much not pretty (that we've seen) for the Republicans, so they've done the obvious thing and immediately stopped having the meetings.
It remains to be seen whether the current outrage will translate to removing the perpetrators and enablers from office; our main opportunity for that will be in two years, and even then won't affect two thirds of the Senate or any of the Administration.
There may be some hope that the hostile takeover of local jurisdictions (towns, counties, school boards mainly) can be reversed, but I can't even guess whether or not to expect that.
**** I feel so sorry for the half of the US that didn't vote for the fat, lying bully
The Florida Orange Man got 49.8% of the votes from the ~64% of eligible voters. That means that less than 32% of eligible voters actually voted for the orange asshole narcissist convicted felon sociopath con man, and more than two-thirds of the US *didn't* vote for him. This country is setup for minority rule.
Replacing high volume, terrestrial comms networks with an untested satellite network seems... ill advised at best. Starlink is great technology and it definitely has it's place, but robust, reliable communications from one piece of critical infrastructure to another piece of critical infrastructure with as little lag and packet loss as possible? Just put in a frigg'n fiber network.
Don't forget the self-destruct nature of Starlink. All of its satellites have a fixed lifespan and the constellation needs to be continually topped-up. Once Musk gets bored with it, or it is just no longer *quite* profitable enough, the whole thing will simply - stop.
If you have landlines, fibre or otherwise, the individual comms companies come and go, but they can all sensibly take over the infrastructure and give you continuity of service.
Which infrastructure, on the whole, has a lifetime way longer than the satellites. There is a measure more redundancy in the space option - once one satellite goes down, others can take over (whilst there are still enough up there). But when Fred The Farmer ploughs up your fibre that can mean a total break in service - although, lookie here, you have a temporary microwave link up as soon as the helicopters arrive with the boxes, meanwhile you only need Dan Dan The Digger Man to replace the line, not a Falcon launch.
Well, yes. Get a redundant fibre.
Although, over the years, we've been sharing happy stories about the backup fibre leaving the site down the same conduit, right under the farmer's drill!
That aside, the basic argument still stands: when your redundancy is at risk, the landline is cheaper to repair (and once the temporary link is up, you get back some extra bandwidth, to get things back to luxurious and not just at workable speeds.
You hope.
UC Berkeley had--by contract--two independently routed lines to an East Coast site as part of the internet backbone. A farmer in New Jersey with a backhoe took out a single fiber cable and both lines went down. What ensued was a lot of pointing at contracts and bills and a sizable payment made over the lack of *actual* independent routing.
"Replacing high volume, terrestrial comms networks with an untested satellite network seems... ill advised at best."
Sorting out hardware that's in orbit is more difficult than something that can be accessed via an automobile by just about any technician. Ground based hardware can also have all the redundancy one likes without worrying about mass. It can be powered by a grid connection, solar and battery all at the same time. If all of those go Tango Uniform, a fossil fueled generator can be fired up to provide power. Using something like Starlink might wind up having gaps if something happens which would be a major issue for a busy passenger airport to only have ATC 50 minutes out of each hour on a precessing schedule.
> Are you new here?
He[1] arises in the morning[2], a fresh new person[3], innocent[4] of the cares of the world, optimistic in his[1] hopes for the future, happy[4] to be alive, a joy[6] to be around.
Then something[7] goes horribly, horribly wrong and he[1] starts to comment on the Internet.
[1] generic usage, no assumptions being made
[2] or whatever time of day he[1] deems appropriate
[3] however much is allowed for by his[1] metabolic rate, which may, or may not, be average for his[1] age. Thus, this much is, indeed, "new here", that being the key hypothesis[5] of this comment
[4] as compared to exhibited norms
[5] which may be proven fals by observation, don't want to be caught making assumptions
[6] a purely subjective statement, observers may differ; please use the appropriate section of the report
[7] the nature of this is yet to be determined, further study may be warranted
@Like a badger
"Clearly it won't be, because it's primarily the systems that are the problem, not the comms."
You know that? You are certain? When they say "The FAA’s reliance on a large percentage of aging and unsustainable or potentially unsustainable collection of ATC systems introduces risks to the FAA's ability to ensure the safe, orderly, and expeditious flow of air traffic," you are 100% certain that there is NO comms component to it?
Note I havnt even tried to make such a claim at all in my post. Note I say if and only if it is useful for the purpose.
"Are you new here?"
I notice you have been here since 3 Jun 2024. This is where the texan 'bless your heart' seems appropriate, I have been here far longer than you have.
>If starlink is the best way to get the FAA upgraded for a useful purpose then great. But only if that is the case.
Remember most FAA controlled airports are in very remote desolate areas with no road, rail or communications links and satellite is the only way of servicing them.
From personal experience there is no practical way of getting to JFK or LAX
@JoshM
"The down-votes on this comment break my brain."
I appreciate your comment ->
I have a few pet trolls who go through most of my posts to downvote. Then there are others who like to assume I am MAGA because I dont back lies against Trump (my criticisms get ignored) so they downvote for their assumption.
Some idiots probably think I am a fan of Musk too so downvote automatically for their assumption. Unfortunately it is difficult to post a rational comment and have everyone think rationally.
It seems most of those chiming in from all sides think it's something simple to manage and any old rubbish will do for replacing it and the existing situation re. obsolescence and suppliers is either down to incompetence or some conspiracy.
The reality is that these systems have reliability and performance requirements similar to avionics (in many ways beyond); they must do a certain job with incredibly high assurance, determinism and continous uptime.
Engineering these things is an exotic task with only a small group of people able to do it because it's *hard*. Most people aren't even vaguely aware of the sort of stuff required let alone able to do it, a bit like most are utterly oblivious to what's involved in the compute inside avionics or other specialist fields compared to their usual toys.
Seeing people stumble in to mess with it without understanding the how and why of everything from the UI to the processors to the networks isn't a huge surprise but it's truly dangerous.
The failure of officialdom to plan for easily anticipated obsolescence and update cycles isn't a consequence of the original system design and it's definitely no reason to have 'experts' roll up, declare it easy and cock it all up especially if it's part of a grift to sell their own consumer grade crap.
This problem exists everywhere in America. Base on a lot of the commentary here, I would say it just exists everywhere. Tech companies are infatuated with "new" and "better" and don't care about "what you already have". You compound that by looking at the shift in the tech industry toward automation and "it just works" architectures and you end up with a lot of stuff that "just works" until it doesn't. Add in a healthy dose of up-and-coming youth that has no interest in infrastructure, how things work (are supposed to work) and all of the other fun descriptions us "old people" aim at the next generations and you end up with no one to support this stuff and keep it alive. In corporate America at least, this problem is the next guy's problem and not mine in our senior leadership ranks. Remember, fixing what ain't broke so it won't break in the future doesn't make money NOW so it's just a loss that was in the original business case.
Yeah, it all sucks.
Requesting a quote from any democrat right now is going to get you an insanely biased response. They've gone off the rails.
It's ridiculous to suggest that Musk is pointing out issues in the FAA's systems simply for personal gain. And Sen. Markey would prefer that Musk tell them behind closed doors? The public has a right to know.
Also, it's "éminence grise".
When airplanes first started carrying passengers, there was no air traffic control and not a huge need for it. As there were more planes in the air, the accidents started piling up to the point where the airlines were very keen on their being some sort of centralized authority that was in charge to improve the odds of the aircraft getting to their destinations intact. With the number of planes in the air at any given second going as fast as they are able, if there isn't an accurate and reliable network of air traffic control, the entire airline industry would fold up. Not that they don't periodically declared bankruptcies as it is, but that's down to poor business practices, a regulation free-for-all and not actual safety issues. Yet.
In the US, the FAA and ATC are the grease that keep a very large portion of commerce going. It's not something that can be evaluated by somebody as simple as Elon and understand that with this sort of thing, it isn't just money-in/money-out accounting. The tendrils reach deep into many places so an ongoing investment to keep it running smoothly and reliably is very important. The same goes for any sort of transportation. When highways get damaged, there can be very serious impacts to the economy. Same for rail. If roads become a network of potholes, people are paying for auto repairs rather than being able to save money for a home/retirement/children's education. After 9/11, the airline industry took a giant hit as well as the US economy from coast to coast.
TL:DR, Plans need to be quickly made and it's money well spent to get on with updates.
Wasn't it the Berlin Airlift that demonstrated the need for Air Traffic Control.
BTW - my take on the 'Flying Car' fantasy - where you hop into your Jetson style Flying Ford and just take off, is tempered by the thought that one day we may need to call Ground Traffic Control before you leave the curb.
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