alt Hacker NewsWhile the incentives are a step forward, officials caution that hiring alone won’t resolve the deeper problems.
The nation’s air traffic control infrastructure is aging, with 51 out of 138 systems currently labeled as unsustainable — some using components more than 50 years old.
An announcement regarding technology upgrades and infrastructure improvements is expected next week.
Haven't they been trying to modernize air traffic control since forever?
I wonder what announcements they're going to make.
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I feel like I've been hearing about NextGen for decades.
Just looked it up and I'm not far off. NextGen started in 2007 and is still ongoing.
Based on what I read earlier, I wouldn't be surprised if it was based on AI that Musk recently purchased. I sincerely hope I'm wrong though. I also hope whatever it is, it doesn't make the ATC system dependent on some proprietary monopoly.
This discussion of ATC makes me nervous, as mandated sudden adoption of new, often proprietary tech nationwide has created a lot of nightmares in other fields like healthcare. Instead of learning lessons from that, we seem to be repeating it over again but even more so.
I haven't been able to find it since but at one point I came across a quote saying that NextGen was the "greatest failure in the history of organized labor." Or something to that effect. A bit of an overstatement but I have to admit I found the parts I could see circa 2010 ridiculous.