Why air traffic control still needs the human touch

[zonoma]

Article about NATS on the BBC news website today:
why air traffic control still needs the human touch (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21195765)

[Vercingetorix]

Ah, gives me a warm glow. :)

[ATC Watcher]

Medium term conflict detection and multi sector planning have been the dream of engineers for decades. They change the name all the time to indicate it is something mew, but it is the same old philosophy.
No-one cares and wants to know if 2 aircraft will be in conflict 18 mintes from now in the dense continental airspace we work, that is 2 sectors away ! And no-one wants a( centralised) automated solution to solve problems that do not exist yet.

The bottom line is that , for the moment, airspace is fractionned in smaller and smaller sectors and capacity is provided by the flexibility and innovative instinct than only humans can provide in those sectors..
Humans will always move far more traffic than machines in those conditions .

Now one day ...if we remove the sectors..that is another story of course. But not in my lifetime..

[mgahan]

It would be interesting to see an ATM version of this presentation:

Children of Magenta - YouTube

MJG

[Tigersaw]

Engineers with laptops?
Think I need a word with my line manager