Wrong.
It's the fact that the FAA has $5.2B in outstanding repairs but only $1.7B allocated for repair.
On top of that, the GS pay scale penalizes federal employees in high CoL areas.
Both are very difficult problems to solve, as the former means dramatically increasing the FAA's budget (which is tiny for the scope of responsibility it has across North America), and the latter means completely reforming the General Schedule.
On top of that, Congress constantly meddles with the FAA and DoT in general because it's the easiest way to get some quick wins for constituents.
The FAA has been working on modernizing air traffic control, but that project won't be completed til 2030 at the earliest.
Furthermore, the Northeast is a uniquely congested airspace with the massive number of airports and passengers.
It's annoying how many modern web sites change their entire design framework once every two years, yes. But ATC? Aeronautics in general? Most of maritime? Once it's certified, it's practically ossified - and for good reason. Bad UI/UX can literally kill [1].
Nevertheless, I think it's worth having the debate - and that led by actual air traffic controllers, please - if and if yes, how, UX/UI can be improved.
[1] https://uxmovement.com/buttons/how-an-interface-mode-killed-...
This isn't where the problem is. It's system reliability, increased air traffic, and increased controller workload.
No, you sound like a middle-manager.
Talk to cashiers. They all want terminal DOS based systems where keyboard is king. It's the fastest once you learn it.
> Instead, it elected to send a “mirror feed” of telemetry from the STARS servers at N90, traveling over 130 miles of commercial copper telecom lines, with fiber optics to follow by 2030.
> The annoyances of traditional cable internet — frequent lag, dropped sessions — are probably familiar to those who stream video or play games online. But for air traffic controllers, even the smallest service disruptions can become dangerous.
So LOL what, they just ... piped it over the Internet? Also can someone make sense of this "new server" costing millions of dollars? Presumably it's not the cost of a server, which is orders and orders of magnitude less than that?
An ATCS like STARS needs to feed from multiple different OT and IT sources like radars, weather stations, other TRACONs, etc and is implemented in it's own airgapped environment.
It can get very pricy very quick. On top of that, the FAA's budget has been sclerotic for decades now after the 1980s era union action and the 1990s era national cost cutting.
And finally, it is a political organization, and NATCA is a fairly prominent union within the AFL-CIO, and could make the lives of NJ representatives hell for pushing reassignment out of Newark.
I would believe it was hard. And maybe it still is if you’re unwilling or unable to take advantage of modern technology.
Current low-cost equipment can easily send 10 or 100Gbps over long distance fiber links. Depending on how quickly you want to fail over when a link or an entire switch, router or rack fails, there are plenty of options that make various tradeoffs between failover latency and bandwidth, all the way up to completely duplicating all the traffic on redundant routes. I would bet that the entire aggregate traffic needed for air traffic control in a region is well under 10Gbps. And 10Gbps dedicated links or leases or (effective) purchases of dark fiber are not expensive on the scale of the FAA. Air traffic should use a network with a lot of redundancy, so maybe multiple those low costs by something like 5.
If seen plenty of old stuff crash because you'll have some ancient serial device with a limited buffer and someone jams a faster link in-between. All of a sudden you have a much larger amount of bandwidth delay product and the system doesn't handle a few megabytes of data getting lost on the line when it bursts for some unexpected reason. On the old fixed line that just couldn't happen.
There's no argument that a private line is ideal for critical infrastructure, but if they must make do, there are ways to make it work.
It looks like it, though in this brochure there is a bunch of what look like Sun rackmount servers in the background as well:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120930072126/http://www.raythe...
But can you even buy these now? A new STAR server setup must be x86 and virtualized,no? Maybe even cloud?
Though I have to admit I have seen government operations where the "server" was an old dell optiplex desktop lying on its side in a broom closet without ventilation, a post-it with "IT SERVER DON'T TURN OFF", a spiderweb of cables running through the closet and the "server" fans screaming for air trying to keep everything cool in the enclosed space. I'm not kidding.
I mean, I know, government. Small local welfare-related org. Shoestring budget. Sure, that sucks. But at least you can make sure it's tidy and the cabling doesn't look like shit. Jeez. I didn't imagine I'd still see that in this century. Do people no longer take pride in their job? They hadn't even activated the "AC Power on" in the BIOS so after electrical maintenance they had to wait for the "engineer" to press the on button again.
Keep in mind that Ethernet over copper is only specified to ~100 meters. Long distance copper networks have been obsolete for a few decades.
Might be something like that in this case as well.
I did some enterprise network work ~20 years ago, including fiddling with some inter-building links, rummaging through closets, and visiting the inside of a legacy campus-scale analog phone exchange, and I’ve never even seen the kind of equipment that can send data at an appreciable speed (even by 1990s standards, and even with repeaters) over copper at a range like 100km.
In contrast, single-mode fiber has improved over time, but it’s not obsolete, and it has maintained a remarkable degree of compatibility over the years. New transceivers largely work on old fiber, old transceivers work on new fiber, etc.
They dont know the difference between copper and fibre.
And yea fibre was in the 80s too. No reason for new deployments to be copper.
> hold all traffic
> rdy?
> gogogo
What they don't realize is maintaining infrastructure is expensive.
Sure there are a lot of inefficiencies with need to be fixed, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Sadly, such is society, and this is a problem that happens everywhere - be they democracies or authoritarian states.
that is, for context, about as high as it was in 1960 when the US population was half as large as it is today.
It breaks all our brains too, because that $6 Trillion has very little to do with maintaining infrastructure. The bulk of it is just direct payouts (Social Security, Medicare and defense contracts).
Pretty frustrating that this big number means the government is politically forced to do drastic austerity for things like keeping planes flying safely.
Also, makes DOGE starting at USAID (<1% of budget) look especially incompetent.
I could type more, but it would be a long and boring story.
There is mismanagement.
There is also a misallocation and underfunding of essential services and infrastructure. This is the excuse for ever more funding.
https://old.reddit.com/r/goodnews/comments/1kuaasx/i_voted_f...
>>I posted this somewhere else ages ago, feel it's relevant
>I remember having a conversation with my ex's sister and their mum a few years ago, around election time. I try to not talk politics with people because it's a fast way to lose friends, but the topic came up between my ex and them over dinner and I just listened in.
>I remember them saying that the only thing they're interested in is tax cuts. More money for them. I had to chime in and ask what about the NHS, what about funding schools? They said they didn't care because they had private healthcare through their jobs (finance), so they don't need the NHS. The mum said her kids are through school so she doesn't care about funding schools, and the sister said she'll be sending her kids to private school one day. I was pretty gobsmacked at the brazen selfishness of it, and asked what if they lose their jobs - and therefore their private health care - or become unable to work, what if when you have kids you can't afford private school? Neither of them could grasp this hypothetical... it was as if I was speaking another language to them. They were just like 'but we do have jobs.' And what if you didn't? 'But we do.' It was just circular and they couldn't see themselves in any situation other than the one they were currently in.
>I can quite see why empathy is a hard concept for right wingers to grasp, it was like they just simply couldn't understand the concept. They weren't stupid either, and nor were they rich - the mum worked in admin for a finance company in the city, and the sister was being paid by the same company (mum got her in the door) to train as an accountant.
>I think about those two every now and then when I can't understand how the other side thinks. Because it seems we do literally think very differently.
If we were building our aviation infrastructure from scratch starting today, you would get some really strange looks if you suggested employing humans to manage air traffic.
Don't you?
Airplanes have gotten increasingly automated. Who is responsible when Airbus' excellent automations that have prevented countless upsets and accidents fail? Nobody, if it was an honest mistake, and lessons learned are applied to improve even further.
The problem with modern ATC is that a lot of the safety systems are bolted and backported on top of existing extremely legacy tech. Ffs, the communications still happen over radio where transmissions are missed if more than one person talks at the same time. And people have died because of this, as well as controllers making a mistake or pilots and controllers misunderstanding each other.
There's no reason to continue bolting more stuff on top. A very large part of ATC can be fully automated and made safer.
Arrival/departure/ground ATC has to deal with much more complex traffic, emergency situations and edge cases in general. Technologically, we're nowhere near fully automating this.
Even the people in charge of our highways want us to switch to operations & maintenance oriented projects, but the representatives have not done so.
The incentives in government are really fucked — you get visibility and wins through cool projects, not by keeping the lights on and things running smoothly. Honestly true in big companies as well.
The current administration is asking for a lot of money to try to fix it again
No, what you discover is a pattern of wasted spending. Then they ask for more money to actually get the job done despite all the waste.
People try to solve this by privatizing certain things, figuring that competition will help efficiency. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Maybe we need competing governments, and whichever government is more efficient gets to rule. Seriously: Add a second FAA at some test airports, see if they can do better, with the understanding that if they can't, they get shut down.
And you would be willing to be personally responsible if people die in this experiment?
It's funny how people here always complain that any money government spends is wasted, but if you look at big companies they are "wasting" money as well. Just look at the number of projects that google killed. It's simply a function of large (and small) organizations that they don't get it right all the time, it's difficult to predict the future.
And without something like a major disaster, it’ll likely continue to get worse and worse.
Rail is incredibly efficient, and there's a reason China has been building high speed rail as fast as it can.
To all the "it would never work here" people: we used to be a nation of rail travel, where you could walk or bike or take a taxi to the local trolley/train/bus station, take a train to where you needed to go.
All that was systematically ripped apart by the auto industry either directly or indirectly. There is no reason whatsoever we can't work our way back, especially given how much faster and easier construction of a railway line is now.
If you have the density to justify it.
There is a case to be made for enhancing rail transit in the eastern seaboard and maybe parts of the Midwest, but America is too large and sparse to justify rail transit at scale.
It makes more sense to concentrate on rail infra for freight transit and work on revamping our existing rail freight infra.
> there's a reason China has been building high speed rail as fast as it can
China stopped subsidizing HSR during the COVID recession. It costs the exact same as a flight ticket now [0] due to high debt [1] (excluding the Beijing-Shanghai track, which actually can justify usage).
Most Chinese use normal rail for intercity transit, but this is easier to justify given the density and ease of land acquisition.
But even then, China began slowing down railway investment and construction since 2018 [2][3], and started calibrating towards air transit [4] as part of a commercial aviation push [5]
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/business/china-bullet-tra...
[1] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2019-01-29/zhao-jian-whats-not-...
[2] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-01-02/china-railway-corp-s...
[3] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-03-30/china-looks-to-slow-...
[4] - https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-03-25/smaller-cities-reach...
[5] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/comac-jet...
Also, China does both new airports and new rail lines.
Don't most of FAA's funds come from taxes on air travel? And around half of Americans travel by air every year, so it's not a niche service.
Californians can.
Subsidies to the movie industry, plumbing run to waterless urinals, bullet trains between farm towns, ...
This is disingenuous and you know it.
I think it was the wrong choice for a number of reasons, but the farm towns in question are just first lot of the whole network, starting with the (supposedly) easiest part. Instead of building in the densest parts which would be even more complicated and expensive.
Governments (and a lot of businesses) like to look at software as a one-time purchase, but it's really better too look at it as a liability and an ongoing cost. It'd be better to have a team make continuous, incremental improvements to the system than have "NextGen" last-gen replacement vaporware.
Even infrequent ~5y update lifecycles tend to be extremely painful unless there is substantial investment in treating it as an essential business process. This leads to a "kick the can" mentality that translates to show-stopping amounts of tech debt.
"Precisely. Months of fruitful work. Leading to a mature and responsible conclusion."
Since it takes 30 years it must be a responsible piece of software, polished to the bone.
Then a 9/11's worth of death EVERY WEEK for the next TWO YEARS of covid
We still have a 9/11's worth of death EVERY MONTH in 2025
Personally I don't want anyone to die in a plane crash
But apparently a hundred million other people do not care anymore about others dying needlessly
So factor that into your next flight if you are taking your life into your own hands?
delta doesn’t reimburse for missed connections claiming air traffic control policies are outside of their control.
it reminds me of a dev team i worked with once which used single threaded memcache as a way to serialize inbound requests to a server with improper locking logic inside.
AFAIK if it's one booking on the same airline or a codeshare they are required to rebook you. If you planned a "connection" which is two single flights with different airlines you don't get any legal protections. This isn't just Delta, no airline will reimburse you for missing a flight you didn't book through them
> Instead, it elected to send a “mirror feed” of telemetry from the STARS servers at N90, traveling over 130 miles of commercial copper telecom lines, with fiber optics to follow by 2030.
This does not make any sense. If they would really transmit data over a 130 miles copper line (which I doubt even still exist, especially not commercial ones), we would be talking rates in the low Mbit/s. I suspect the situation is that the "last mile" of the center is served by copper connections, not good either but by far not as bad as a 130 miles copper connection.
EDIT: I should add if they really would have a link running on copper lines it would have repeaters, which would be sitting in datacenters. In New Jersey there would by 1000s of km of dark fiber floating around, so it would be trivial to convert at least the majority of the link to fiber.
alwa•4h ago