You're left with a bunch of planes in the sky that can't stay there forever, and not enough humans on the ground to manually land them.

Now image the outage is also happening at all airports nearby, preventing planes from diverting.

How do you get the planes out of the sky? Not enough humans to do it manually.

Now imagine the system comes back online. Does it know how to handle a crisis scenario where you have dozens of planes overhead, each about to run out of fuel? Hopefully someone thought of that edge case.

My suggestion is to restrict the use of smaller jets like crj and turboprops. I know airports like LaGuardia can't handle the big jets either, but they could reduce the slots and require a jet that holds, say, 150 people or more. This would result in fewer flights per day to some airports, but reduce overall congestion while still serving the same number of passengers.

Literally the crash here was caused by a fire truck entering the runway.

A naive view that confuses the map with the territory.

While in a database state you write a row and reality updates atomically....for aircraft they exist in a physical world where your model lives with lag, noise, and lossy sensors, and that world keeps moving whether your software is watching or not. Failed database transactions roll back, a landing clearance issued against stale state does not. The hard problem in ATC is not coordination logic but physical objects with momentum, human agency, and failure modes that do not respect your consistency model.

Go write it then.

Why don’t you describe the hypothetical automation you believe would solve the problems then?

My hunch is that either your ideas are already implemented (like GP post who said they need to add red lights at the runway instances, except yeah, they do have that), or they are just bad.

> indignant sputtering and patronizing hand-waving.

Preemptively insulting everyone who might respond to you certainly looks like you’re asking for a real conversation. :|

Your accusation of “patronizing hand-waving” is especially off base considering you literally proposed nothing except “automating”. Hand waving indeed.

But calling a replacement of major ATC functions with software a "simple fix" is a perfect illustration of why this is a bad idea. Nothing about human-rated safety-critical software is simple, and coming at it with the attitude that it is? In my view, as an experienced pilot, flight instructor, spacecraft operator, and software engineer, that thinking is utterly disqualifying.

Besides, there already are a lot of "simple" fixes in place for this problem, e.g. RWSL, which didn't prevent this accident.

In this case, from the available information, the drivers of the fire truck thought they were cleared, and proceeded to cross while a plane was cleared to land. I'm not familiar with ATC ground radio to know if they were actually cleared or not, but it seems clear that that the drivers thought they were cleared.

In the audio released by the BBC, the fire truck DID get permission from the tower to cross something, I can't tell if it was the runway in question. However, to cross the red runway lights if lit, you normally need that spelled out too something like "truck one, cross four delta, cross red lights". This did not happen on the BBC audio, which could mean one of many things.

https://www.faa.gov/nextgen

Almost all voice transmissions are routine instructions/clearances from ground to air, with the pilots reading them back to reduce the chance of errors. In fact, this already exists and is in wide use in (at least) the US, EU, and in transoceanic airspace.

Of course, now you have two systems that can fail, and reducing reliance on the older one can easily cause automation complacency (which is a well-researched source of errors) and require more frequent refresher courses if the skill is not practiced on a continuos basis.

I suspect that that these are the reasons it's not commonly used for approach and tower operations: There's a lot more spontaneous and/or nonstandard stuff happening in those flight phases, and as you say you don't want a pilot's eyes on a tiny screen/keyboard instead of on their instruments or out the window.

Should they be combined at LGA when both (crossing) runways are in use, and there's an incident on the field? (The fire trucks were on their way to investigate a smell on the flight deck of another airplane that had to abort takeoff twice.)

I'd say hell no.

The obvious problem is what happens when operations become abnormal. ATC shouldn't be staffed for normal operations, because then abnormal operations lead to catastrophe. Welcome to last night: the weather is bad, which causes a plane to abort two takeoffs, which causes that plane to need emergency services. This increases the controller's workload beyond his capacity, so he accidentally clears the emergency vehicle to cross in front of a landing airplane, and they can't see the airplane because the weather is bad, so they follow the instruction and promptly get hit with an airplane.

When some bad weather can be the difference between "this is fine, one controller can handle it" and two dead pilots, you need to be staffed for bad weather.

So why the fuck would any talented individual choose to go work for the "Get an example made out of you" department, on top of the horrific stress of the actual job!?

The idea of a union that "isn't allowed" to strike is a joke. Next will be a union that has a max membership of 1!

I can almost guarantee you the airplane was visible from taxiway D.

I highly doubt that any system would intentionally give ground vehicles of any kind special treatment on an active runway.

The margins are thin enough that certain planes will sometimes have people in the back get off first, before the people on the front, to avoid tipping onto the tail like this.