NewModel's statement
The railway signalmen (who did a job very similar to the modern controller’s job)
brings back old memories. All through my career I have heard this comparison. As Lon More has said already, mostly to keep the salaries down. However, for the salaries the comparison didn't work. Salaries in the US and Europe are higher than ever dreamt of by PATCO in the eighties. I'm not speaking for extreme greediness of course and also not for countries like India or Brazil where there is room, or rather urge, for improvement to say it mildly.
NewModel uses the railway comparison again to argue that ATC can be automated. Does his argument hold water? Or, more generally, should ATC be automated? In fact, the answer is simple: if automation brings advances in safety, capacity, economy and environmental exhausts - yes, it will happen.
NewModel brings a demonstration model where everything fits. However, a demonstration model
demonstrates potential but does not
prove any advance in safety, capacity or economy. Also the NewModel is far from unique, as claimed by New Model. PPrune moderator has already made the correct reference:
I am sure I saw such a system at Bretigny Sur Orge in the mid 1990s.
Valuable concept development since the mid nineties has been abundant. In the US we have witnessed the rise and fall of the 5 billion $ NAS modernisation project of the nineties, a managers and engineers dream intended to replace ATCO's in the wake of the PATCO sackings (this was before the UAL pilot ignited the Free Flight discussion, which also took millions of $). European R&D culminated in the common PHARE project, demonstrating the potential of automated arrival management and conflict detection/resolution.
Since PHARE, specifications for Basic and Advanced ATC Functions (of the type that one can see demonstrated in the NewModel), including all important HMI, have continuously been upgraded in international forums and demonstrated in various models, at Eurocontrol's Bretigny, CENA in France, NATS and Qinetiq research in UK, DLR in Germany, NLR in the Netherlands, NASA and MITRE in the US. I will not go into the detail of all the resulting demo products. Many contributions to this thread mention them and they can be seen at aviation exhibitions and on websites.
The pan-European Flight Data Processing project where NewModel got involved in was the eFDP. Now he claims
Laugh out loud if you like but I AM one of the most knowledgeable people in FDP systems. How was it that nobody else on the eFDP project had ever worked on an FDP implementation?
A lot can be said of eFDP and its political fate and breakdown into three national or regional projects (VAFORIT in Germany, SACTA in Spain and UK, and the French/Italian project, with Eurocontrol's Maastricht and East European CEATS staying on the fence), but it is
blatantly untrue for anyone to claim that nobody in eFDP ever worked on an FDP implementation. Scandalously untrue even. I will not publish the names and coordinates in a forum like this but I have them available.
One might say that those with real FDP implementation experience were on the conservative side and were not ready to include the advanced functions which are now in the NewModel, but that is something else. There was also political clout because contributing National Administrations preferred to develop their own systems, which also seems to be NewModel's line of thinking where he says
what is NATS worth if another ANSP realises the potential
Surely, NewModel has demonstrated the usefulness of automated advanced functions. But his dream of getting included in John Steinbeck's hall of fame of inventors should be challenged and is in fact counterproductive. NewModel is just one of those, an engineer building on the common experience of many, many others. He would do better to keep acknowledging this, as he still used to do two years ago in previous posts
The New Model draws on the conclusions of projects such as ERATO and CORA
ATC automation is a continuous process where we are all cogs in a wheel which is put in motion by the need to improve safety, to gain capacity, economical benefits and the necessary contribution to diminish the ever more threatening exhausts in our atmosphere. The NewModel is a good contribution to show the way ahead and I hope its demonstrations will contribute to convincing managers, engineers and ATCO's that their systems should evolve in this direction.
Having said this, it seems necessary to add that, as long as there is no closed loop between FMS and FDPS, automation in ATC will not be able to go any further than automated assistance to ATCO's, who will continue to be the pivot of ATC. Only when FMS and FDPS exchange data and intent, the role of the ATCO can evolve further.