Forward air control would get a map grid or other description of the target from Infantry and Aircraft would be dispatched to the target . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_air_control_operations...

As an aside, wasn't there some HN post a few months back about how carrier warfare in the Pacific led to more and more complex schemes of ATC, aka "Fighter Directors", including early Naval computers devoted to figuring out where to put airplanes in the right place at the right time right time?

I read in A Bridge Too Far, the Hawker Typhoons that attacked German positions at the start of the Operation (called in by the Forward Air Comtroller), flew under the opening barrage and one Typhoon disintegrated as it was hit by a shell. I've often wondered if there was any system in place to prevent that sort of thing.

The general lack of front line radios makes me think he wouldn't generally have been talking directly to the troops on the ground but the entire field of air combat much less close air support was in it's infancy so a lot of the doctrine was being made up on the fly. By the end of the war they had made a lot of improvements including bringing control of CAS closer to the frontline units that would be calling it in.

More about the US side of the conflict:

https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/jfrpiu/how_did_...

Not Europe (assuming from your grandfather flying Typhoons) but here's a paper about how the Marines in the Pacific were developing the idea of close air support in the Pacific: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA369287.pdf

A random book I found that might have more specifics about the RAF and British use of CAS: https://crecy.co.uk/product/close-call-raf-close-air-support...

Close air support is the phrase you're looking for for your own searches though if he was bombing tanks in the field.

This was indeed normalized very early on in post WWII european construction:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocontrol

In a nutshell it goes like this: you file a flight plan to go from A in country A to B in country B. Every country that you cross will know about this.

Depending if you fly IFR or VFR and at what altitude, you will talk to either a flight information service (FIS), Radar or Area Control Center (ACC).

Hand-off is usually done a few miles from the border of the next country you're going to pass. You tell them who you are and where you're going to. They can let you fly as planned or give you another route or altitude.

From a pilot's point of view is pretty simple and straightforward.

Internationally, the concept of regulated airspace began taking shape after World War I. Under the Treaty of Versailles, the International Commission for Air Navigation (ICAN) was created in 1919, developing the first air traffic regulatory framework initially signed by 19 states.

There is cooperation between states, with the best example I know of being the Maastricht Upper Area Control Centre (MUAC) which was established in 1972 by Eurocontrol and manages the upper airspace (above 24,500 feet) over Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and northwest Germany.

Eurocontrol is the first and, to the best of my knowledge, the only successful attempt to pool controllers between countries in Europe.

ICAO exists for exactly this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Civil_Aviation_O...

I take your point but simply throwing silicone at the problem doesn't make things all of a sudden better. Wind data can already be uplinked to aircraft through ACARS anyway. The problem is aviation is very dynamic. You can't fly the plane and get a bing bong message cleared to land and not be distracted by it. Voice comms are flawed but one of the benefits is you can hear them and monitor the aircraft state. ATC have systems which add another layer of protection for a misidentified runway for example.

> If you call your granny via whatsapp

Remember flight MH370? The industry doesn't want obviously good solutions if it costs more than $1 per passenger. There is room to automate part of this, and have ATC and pilot human oversight with manual contingencies. But no one is going to pay for it, not through normal or usual and customary processes. Most of the major US stakeholders (airlines) are poor.

> Most of the radio calls today (>95%) are bog standard verbal exchanges about things that should not require any humans in the loop. Anything to with weather is just numbers that can and should be be exchanged digitally. Much faster, less room for error. There should be zero confusion about what the altimeter settings are at a particular airport, what the active runway is, where the wind is coming from, etc.

> Anything to do with "who are you and why are you here", which is a disturbingly large proportion of verbal exchanges, sounds like it could be established both more securely, robustly, and efficiently. We have computers now with things like secure hashes, uuids, certificates, etc. Any time you have enough bandwidth to talk to somebody you definitely have enough bandwidth to throw quite a bit of data around securely and reliably.

The problem is, for that to work, you'd need to push a worldwide coordinated effort to upgrade everyone. Hundreds of thousands of GA aircraft, historical aircraft, about 30k commercial aircraft and most likely hundreds if not thousands of different models. For each of these you'd need to develop and most importantly certify a digital avionics package. And you'd need to train about half a million pilots for commercial flight, on top of that all the GA pilots.

And no, "give pilots an iPad" doesn't count. That's what many airlines are already doing so pilots have an alternative to paper charts of approaches or on-ground navigation... but the old paper and radio? That all still has gotta be present because that stuff is actually certified to be redundant and (largely) fail-proof.

There's a reason innovation speed is very slow in aviation: it took decades worth of work and many thousands of deaths to get aviation to be what it is: the most safe way of transportation by far. You probably have a higher chance of getting hit by a drunk driver than to even get a small injury on a commercial airplane, because all the failure modes of airplanes and individual parts have been worked out. Every kind of new part, new systems and new material introduces new failure modes that have to be discovered, mitigated and the mitigation be distributed around the world.

  The current system won't scale with that, it will have to change.
  Now would be a good time to start figuring that out.

Modernization has been in the works for years now. Chronic underfunding means that nothing much has come from it.

  Anything to with weather is just numbers that can and should be be
  exchanged digitally. 

It often is, via ACARS.

  It's completely redundant information. 

Redundancy is the point.

From what you said I take it you're not a pilot.

> Routine course changes, altitude changes, etc. could be communicated and confirmed via computers. Voice channels should be used for emergencies and non standard situations only.

Do you think when planes get closer to the airport, pilots want to keep their eyes on the group chat while trying to land? :)

> Most of the radio calls today (>95%) are bog standard verbal exchanges about things that should not require any humans in the loop. Anything to with weather is just numbers that can and should be be exchanged digitally. Much faster, less room for error. There should be zero confusion about what the altimeter settings are at a particular airport, what the active runway is, where the wind is coming from, etc.

ACARS and CPDLC handle a lot of this. A change of altitude/flight level can be sent from ATC, accepted by a pilot, and updated in the autopilot without anyone speaking over VHF.

But is it that complex? Airplanes arrive in your sector, you write the number and destination on a slip of paper, and put it on your board. You tell the plane, if needed, where to fly, and then you tell it to talk to the next sector controller when it leaves your area.

It seems rather non-complex, and I think it has to be, so it can be robust and offer room for errors etc.

The RSS feed is another good option!