Summary
The Trump administration has begun firing several hundred FAA employees via emails, including workers in radar, landing, and navigational aid roles, as well as personnel in a classified early warning radar program for Hawaii.
The terminations occur just weeks after a fatal mid-air collision at Reagan Washington National Airport amid ongoing staffing shortages and safety concerns in air traffic control.
Some employees allege the firings were politically motivated and executed without following standard government protocols.
Have you ever used software… it ain’t great. They also have software that can land planes. You wanna volunteer for those flights?
Without taking either side of this debate - you realize that the vast majority of the duration of a flight is already automated by software, right?
yep. But the subject on the thread was that there is software that does a lot of what an air traffic controller does, but we currently make it’s recommendations go through a person first. And he/she was saying it should skip the ATC and go straight to the aircraft, so we don’t need as many ATC’s. Auto-pilot today is basically the same thing as to how that software is used today. The pilot turns it on. And they can turn it off very quickly. So they are still always there checking up on the technology. Taking the human completely out of the loop would be a very big difference. And I am not saying that software couldn’t be written that we could trust. Just that our current society keep software in a race to the bottom quality-wise. So there isn’t enough people with the experience it would take to do it totally perfectly that can be hired to work on it. And the government certainly would never pay them enough if they could be found.
I use a lot of software. Buggy as all get out apps gets tossed for apps that work.
Being stuck with buggy software from the 1940’s sounds worse to me.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/06/nx-s1-5286407/air-traffic-control-expert-discusses-the-outdated-technology-behind-u-s-systems
Go sit in the back of a Tesla and have it drive you somewhere.