In 1972 I began some work at MIT Lincoln Lab on advanced air traffic control systems. It ran the gamut from radars, tracking and airport surface traffic control. In 1977 I was seconded to the FAA to work on AirSat, and using GPS. At the time I lectured on GPS at GWU, and I gather I was one of the few experts in the area. I spoke with Congress to incorporate GPS as well as advanced ATC systems. Strangely the greatest opponent was Senator Kennedy and his staff. I guess he finally concurred.
Now fifty years later we are no further ahead than in the mid 70s. One example of this mess is the MIT Lincoln Lab group who has spent fifty years and billions working on this. A leader in the group asserts that their major achievement is:
... is invested in cultivating a strong culture of innovation and is deeply committed to diversity and inclusion across the Laboratory. She currently serves as the Executive Sponsor for the Lincoln Laboratory Hispanic/Latinx Network employee resource group
It seems that this person is more involved with DEI things than getting the billions of dollars of technology working. As the NY Times asserts:
The Federal Aviation Administration said
that the outage, which affected communications and radar displays at the
facility in Philadelphia, occurred just before 4 a.m. and lasted about
90 seconds.
A similar outage of about
90 seconds last week, on a Monday afternoon, upended travel at the
airport, leaving controllers with no way to communicate with pilots and
keep planes from crashing into one another. Several controllers working
that afternoon were distressed by that episode and took time off, which
resulted in several days of low staffing at the facility, causing
widespread flight delays and cancellations.
Now loss of telecom connectivity is a demonstration of gross incompetence in my opinion and my experience. In building my fiber network in Eastern Europe I demanded fail safe systems. Diversity touting and redundancy. If the FAA moved things to Philly then there should have been several alternate route for a fail safe system. Instead, after five decades we are still providing a mid 20th century system. Heads should roll, publicly. The Secretary of Transportation should not spend time saying what is wrong but fix it from day 1 on the job. Stop the Press announcements and solve the problem.
One simple solution is that there should be no politicians in charge, just operations thugs, solving problems, cleaning out the stables, and no press meetings. Also stop the praise of their DEI efforts, lives are at risk.