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Air Traffic Controllers To Disappear By 2020?
from the believe-it-when-I-see-it dept
Roland Piquepaille writes "This might be the case if a new computer system developed by British Aerospace proves to be successful. The Electronic Telegraph covers the story, in "Computer system 'can land aircraft without air traffic controllers'." "British Aerospace scientists have developed a revolutionary airborne computer system that they claim can land aircraft safely without human air traffic controllers. It will enable a pilot to determine an aircraft's landing path simply by pressing a button in the cockpit." The technology was tested in March while leading airlines should adopt it by 2008. And in 2020, all air traffic controllers should be replaced by this computer system. Scary thought, isn't? This reminds me another frightening story published last year by Salon.com, which stated that Microsoft wanted us to take planes without pilots by 2030. My blog contains more details, including an illustration showing how the system works." I've been hearing similar predictions for years. I'll believe it when I see it.
Reader Comments
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Air Traffic Controllers Disappeared For a While in
Ofcourse, technology had nothing to do with it, and a good chunk of readers probably were too young or not born so have no idea what I am talking about.
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Re: Air Traffic Controllers Disappeared For a Whil
I'm assuming you may be referring to the PATCO ATC strike that began Aug. 3, 1981, (your comment was somehow truncated). Most people don't know that 12,000 USA controllers were fired by Ronald Reagan and barred for life from returning to their profession. Also, it was successfully hidden that the FAA illegally used military controllers to break the strike and fortunately got away with it without losing any aircraft. This might be used as an earlier example of the media 'caving in' to a Republican administration, indicating that what has happened recently is not altogether unique.
As to ATC being done away with? It could not be considered unless some other redundancy besides controllers could be developed to handle likely terrorist activity. How are we doing with the development of AI?
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