6 ms·

We can’t trust general use self driving cars yet. Air traffic control is a bit riskier than that

by Abekkus 10mo ago

kayodelycaon 10mo ago
There’s a lot of automation that can be done to reduce the workload of controllers. Making an autopilot for airplanes is significantly easier than cars.
- roncesvalles 10mo ago
  But the stakes are much higher. On a side note, I will use this thread to air out my biggest pet peeve - air travel isn't in fact safer than car travel. Well, it is, per mile, but that's cheating because planes travel so fast. Obviously a 3 hour commercial flight is safer than 40 hours of driving. But cars are still safer per journey. So, if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, your car ride wasn't actually more dangerous than your flight as the saying goes. The only road-based transportion more dangerous than a plane is the bicycle.
  - amluto 10mo ago
    Commercial air travel has a passenger fatality on something like one in ten million flights [0], and less than that on newer aircraft. Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. [1] So maybe you are technically correct. Barely. And it has nothing to do with airplanes being fast — planes only need to go a few tens of miles per trip to be significantly safer than cars, and plane trips are a lot longer than that. [0] https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm [1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
    - nandomrumber 10mo ago
      > Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. Which is vanishingly small. It means the average driver can expect to be a fatality in an automobile accident once ever one to two hundred years or more.
      - sokoloff 10mo ago
        If you drive a fairly typical 12.5K miles per year, it will take you 8000 years to drive 100M miles. “Or more” technically includes a factor of 20-80x, but I think you were way low.
        nandomrumber 10mo ago
        Thanks. Sloppy work. I’m half an Australia away from my usual internet-rant tooling, and I find multi-tab cross referencing on mobile pretty unenjoyable.
    - roncesvalles 10mo ago
      All I'm saying is: if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, the drive to the airport wasn't more dangerous than your flight on the plane. This is intuitive and obvious and yet is somehow beaten out of us by "quick facts" that we accept blindly touting commercial aviation as some kind of miracle. It's still a miracle but not quite to the degree that people believe. Hurtling through the sky at 0.8 Mach in a metal tube will always be more dangerous than rolling down a highway in a metal cage at 70 mph. None of the people who responded to me yet have refuted this.
  - DougBTX 10mo ago
    From https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/ https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/ > In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was .003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on US highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles. Planes travel about 10x-20x faster than cars, but that’s still 0.06 vs 0.57. Seems like quite a difference. Which numbers are you using?
  - sokoloff 10mo ago
    Is the purpose of travel to go from one place to another or to spend time? If it’s to go from one place to another, referencing statistics to per-mile seems to make more sense and, to me, it’s in no way “cheating because planes travel so fast”.
    - roncesvalles 10mo ago
      But your choice of destination changes because air travel is available to you. You wouldn't go to a destination thousands of miles away, as often, if it weren't possible to fly there.
- nradov 10mo ago
  It's always hilarious to see ignorant developers on HN claiming that real world engineering problems are easy to solve based on zero actual knowledge or experience. This kind of comment is really peak HN. An autopilot for airplanes is only "easy" until something goes wrong. For example, one failure mode for autopilots is that if the aircraft gets progressively more and more out of trim the autopilot will automatically compensate until it hits its design limit. Then it suddenly disengages, leaving the human pilots in manual control of a nearly uncontrollable aircraft. If you talk to an actual flight control engineer they can give you plenty more examples of why building a safe autopilot is quite hard.
  - terminalshort 10mo ago
    And yet it was done decades ago. Air traffic control is just as solvable.
    - nradov 10mo ago
      "Done" in what sense? Do you even understand how autopilots work and how limited they are?
  - oasisaimlessly 10mo ago
    So why did we have airplane autopilots decades before car autopilots if it's not easier? "Easier" != "easy"
    - tjohns 10mo ago
      Airplane autopilots are basically just cruise control. You still have a human in the loop double checking everything constantly and stepping in as soon as something isn’t routine (which is actually quite frequently).
    - Aurornis 10mo ago
      This is such a strange comment section. Airplane autopilot is more like the cruise control feature in your car, not a self-driving computer that does everything for the pilots while they sit back. Car autopilot and airplane autopilot don't share much in common other than the word "autopilot"
viraptor 10mo ago
Completely different things. Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead. Comparing their risk is a complete apples and oranges situation. Than again, ATC needs to deal with people talking on the radio, so the current system has a really long way to go to be completely automated.
- tjohns 10mo ago
  Air traffic also requires the use of visual skills - and it’s harder than driving because of the small target size and wide field of view. “See and avoid” has a very high priority in the cockpit - not everything out there is on radar, not everything on radar is under ATC control.
- radishingr 10mo ago
  Also remember that ATC is vital for emergency situations. "Your distress call is important to us, please continue screaming into the void and hopefully a miracle happens.
- Aurornis 10mo ago
  > Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead. It's funny to read all of these confident comments claiming ATC is easily automated from people who obviously don't understand what ATC entails. ATC isn't just planning and scheduling. There is a lot of quick thinking and communication with pilots. You might only be thinking of the everything-goes-perfectly-right case, but the real value of having trained ATC operators is handling all of the edge cases and making quick decisions under high pressure scenarios that may not have even been represented in the training set. ATC is also partially a visual job. Did you ever notice that there's literally a tower at the airport for air traffic control people? The people in this tower will manage things like traffic on the ground and immediate airspace around the tower. Visual inputs and critical thinking skills are very necessary.
  - 10mo ago
terminalshort 10mo ago
Speak for yourself. I ride in Waymos frequently.

We can’t trust general use self driving cars yet. Air traffic control is a bit riskier than that

by Abekkus 10mo ago

We can’t trust general use self driving cars yet. Air traffic control is a bit riskier than that

There’s a lot of automation that can be done to reduce the workload of controllers. Making an autopilot for airplanes is significantly easier than cars.

roncesvalles 10mo ago
But the stakes are much higher. On a side note, I will use this thread to air out my biggest pet peeve - air travel isn't in fact safer than car travel. Well, it is, per mile, but that's cheating because planes travel so fast. Obviously a 3 hour commercial flight is safer than 40 hours of driving. But cars are still safer per journey. So, if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, your car ride wasn't actually more dangerous than your flight as the saying goes. The only road-based transportion more dangerous than a plane is the bicycle.
- amluto 10mo ago
  Commercial air travel has a passenger fatality on something like one in ten million flights [0], and less than that on newer aircraft. Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. [1] So maybe you are technically correct. Barely. And it has nothing to do with airplanes being fast — planes only need to go a few tens of miles per trip to be significantly safer than cars, and plane trips are a lot longer than that. [0] https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm [1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/state-by-state https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
  - nandomrumber 10mo ago
    > Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. Which is vanishingly small. It means the average driver can expect to be a fatality in an automobile accident once ever one to two hundred years or more.
    - sokoloff 10mo ago
      If you drive a fairly typical 12.5K miles per year, it will take you 8000 years to drive 100M miles. “Or more” technically includes a factor of 20-80x, but I think you were way low.
      - nandomrumber 10mo ago
        Thanks. Sloppy work. I’m half an Australia away from my usual internet-rant tooling, and I find multi-tab cross referencing on mobile pretty unenjoyable.
  - roncesvalles 10mo ago
    All I'm saying is: if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, the drive to the airport wasn't more dangerous than your flight on the plane. This is intuitive and obvious and yet is somehow beaten out of us by "quick facts" that we accept blindly touting commercial aviation as some kind of miracle. It's still a miracle but not quite to the degree that people believe. Hurtling through the sky at 0.8 Mach in a metal tube will always be more dangerous than rolling down a highway in a metal cage at 70 mph. None of the people who responded to me yet have refuted this.
- DougBTX 10mo ago
  From https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/ https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/ > In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was .003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on US highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles. Planes travel about 10x-20x faster than cars, but that’s still 0.06 vs 0.57. Seems like quite a difference. Which numbers are you using?
- sokoloff 10mo ago
  Is the purpose of travel to go from one place to another or to spend time? If it’s to go from one place to another, referencing statistics to per-mile seems to make more sense and, to me, it’s in no way “cheating because planes travel so fast”.
  - roncesvalles 10mo ago
    But your choice of destination changes because air travel is available to you. You wouldn't go to a destination thousands of miles away, as often, if it weren't possible to fly there.
nradov 10mo ago
It's always hilarious to see ignorant developers on HN claiming that real world engineering problems are easy to solve based on zero actual knowledge or experience. This kind of comment is really peak HN. An autopilot for airplanes is only "easy" until something goes wrong. For example, one failure mode for autopilots is that if the aircraft gets progressively more and more out of trim the autopilot will automatically compensate until it hits its design limit. Then it suddenly disengages, leaving the human pilots in manual control of a nearly uncontrollable aircraft. If you talk to an actual flight control engineer they can give you plenty more examples of why building a safe autopilot is quite hard.
- terminalshort 10mo ago
  And yet it was done decades ago. Air traffic control is just as solvable.
  - nradov 10mo ago
    "Done" in what sense? Do you even understand how autopilots work and how limited they are?
- oasisaimlessly 10mo ago
  So why did we have airplane autopilots decades before car autopilots if it's not easier? "Easier" != "easy"
  - tjohns 10mo ago
    Airplane autopilots are basically just cruise control. You still have a human in the loop double checking everything constantly and stepping in as soon as something isn’t routine (which is actually quite frequently).
  - Aurornis 10mo ago
    This is such a strange comment section. Airplane autopilot is more like the cruise control feature in your car, not a self-driving computer that does everything for the pilots while they sit back. Car autopilot and airplane autopilot don't share much in common other than the word "autopilot"

viraptor 10mo ago

Completely different things. Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead. Comparing their risk is a complete apples and oranges situation. Than again, ATC needs to deal with people talking on the radio, so the current system has a really long way to go to be completely automated.

tjohns 10mo ago
Air traffic also requires the use of visual skills - and it’s harder than driving because of the small target size and wide field of view. “See and avoid” has a very high priority in the cockpit - not everything out there is on radar, not everything on radar is under ATC control.
radishingr 10mo ago
Also remember that ATC is vital for emergency situations. "Your distress call is important to us, please continue screaming into the void and hopefully a miracle happens.
Aurornis 10mo ago
> Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead. It's funny to read all of these confident comments claiming ATC is easily automated from people who obviously don't understand what ATC entails. ATC isn't just planning and scheduling. There is a lot of quick thinking and communication with pilots. You might only be thinking of the everything-goes-perfectly-right case, but the real value of having trained ATC operators is handling all of the edge cases and making quick decisions under high pressure scenarios that may not have even been represented in the training set. ATC is also partially a visual job. Did you ever notice that there's literally a tower at the airport for air traffic control people? The people in this tower will manage things like traffic on the ground and immediate airspace around the tower. Visual inputs and critical thinking skills are very necessary.
- 10mo ago

terminalshort 10mo ago

Speak for yourself. I ride in Waymos frequently.