The worst nightmare for an air traffic controller

I saw an Aerocar at an aerospace museum in Washington state a couple years ago

The obvious problems are related to "Joe sixpack" flying over us. How many times have we seen cars dead on or beside the road? Each of those is a forced landing and possible crash for an aircraft.

Mike

The idiots out there can't drive or think in 2 dimensions let alone 3 !!!

GEO

Michael Pardee wrote:

A man with a golden gun overhead! :-)

FAA would probably enforce similar maintenance rules at least initially. If these would ever see the production line that is. I'm glad I'm not living on the top floor though :-)))

You can be absolutely, positively, and assuredly guaranteed that flying cars on a large scale will not be around in your lifetime, the lifetime of your great, great grandchildren and can probably be assured that it will never happen.

People make mistakes. Always have and always will. A mistake on the ground is bad enough, but a mistake in the air would be a disaster.

Machines fail, computers fail and most of all, software fails. The more complex software becomes, the more critical the failure. I've broken a lot of software in my time. :)

Look back to the 1950's and you will see that people thought that by the year 2000, we would be on other planets and that the sky would be filled with anti-gravity vehicles and other marvelous things. We have cellphones, jet airliners and computers, but we aren't really that far ahead of where we were in 1950.

In the 1950's, we had the beginnings of radar to control air traffic and used 10 miles as a separation standard. Today we use 5 miles, except in areas near airports and there we use 3. In 55 years, we haven't advanced any more than that.

Anyway, as soon as we become Northern Mexico, progress will slow down drastically or even stop. Habla Espanol?

Don

You seem to be right. According to this

I guess I'm an idiot after all :-( I meant partitioning class A of course.

At least GPS makes it much easier to know EXACTLY where you are.

Splitting horizontally only works so far, with the end result being landing at an airport. You have to merge the traffic at some point and the more aircraft you have parallel to each other, the more difficulty you have merging them. Also, each controller has designated airspace and if you try to horizontally separate traffic, you impinge on another controller's airspace. Rearranging airspace is an inexact science and is an ongoing process at all control centers.

Don