The FAA and Gross Incompetence

 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.

 

51 Years Later, the FAA is Still Incompetent

 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.