In the summer of 1974 I was asked to take a group of minority students, from Boston, and develop a plan for airport surface traffic control. The group became the MIT MITES program for minority High School students. We had a bright yellow van with equipment and my helpers. The system was to enhance DABS, the Discrete Address Beacon System, and improved version for traffic control.
My first day out to go to Logan Airport, there was this gigantic canary yellow van with Discreet Address Beacon System on the side, NOT Discrete! For a moment I thought I was in the business of solicitation! But off we went for two months of testing and design. I had developed and tested an airport surface contorl system employing transponders and multiple beam antennas.
We even had software. Unfortunately we were thereat Logan the day a plane slammed into the end of a runway from Portland. All dies, a lesson for how important the work was for students!
But the lesson was that the FAA had options to improve airport traffic then, and now fifty years later they still mess up.The NY Times notes:
American Airlines Flight 2246, arriving at National Airport from Boston was making its final descent around 8:20 a.m. when it suddenly canceled its landing, climbed toward the skies and accelerated away from the airport. The last-minute move allowed it to avoid colliding with another plane that was ready to take off from the same runway, the Federal Aviation Administration said. The airplane’s pilots were told to scrap the landing by an air traffic controller to “ensure separation was maintained between this aircraft and a preceding departure from the same runway,” the F.A.A. said in a statement. Around 8:50 a.m. Central time, the pilots of Southwest Airlines Flight 2504, traveling from Omaha, canceled the plane’s landing at Chicago Midway after “a business jet entered the runway without authorization,” the F.A.A. said in a statement.
The FAA lacks systems that would assist ATC. The unauthorized private jet pilot should receive the severest of punishment. But alas all goes by the wayside. As they seem to say today, where is Musk when you need him? We just lost 700 forest rangers! Try the FAA folks. Its technology seems to be in the 19th century.
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