Air Traffic Control

Summary

>>> 2025-05-11 air traffic control (PDF) Air traffic control has been in the news lately, on account of my country's declining ability to do it. Well, that's a long-term trend, resulting from decades of under-investment, severe capture by our increasingly incompetent defense-industrial complex, no small degree of management incompetence in the FAA, and long-lasting effects of Reagan crushing the PATCO strike. But that's just my opinion, you know, maybe airplanes got too woke. In any case, it's an interesting time to consider how weird parts of air traffic control are. The technical, administrative, and social aspects of ATC all seem two notches more complicated than you would expect. ATC is heavily influenced by its peculiar and often accidental development, a product of necessity that perpetually trails behind the need, and a beneficiary of hand-me-down military practices and technology. Aviation Radio In the early days of aviation, there was little need for ATC---there just weren't many planes, and technology didn't allow ground-based controllers to do much of value. There was some use of flags and signal lights to clear aircraft to land, but for the most part ATC had to wait for the development of aviation radio. The impetus for that work came mostly from the First World War. Here we have to note that the history of aviation is very closely intertwined with the history of warfare. Aviation technology has always rapidly advanced during major conflicts, and as we will see, ATC is no exception. By 1913, the US Army Signal Corps was experimenting with the use of radio to communicate with aircraft. This was pretty early in radio technology, and the aircraft radios were huge and awkward to operate, but it was also early in aviation and "huge and awkward to operate" could be similarly applied to the aircraft of the day. Even so, radio had obvious potential in aviation. The first military application for aircraft was reconnaissance. Pilots could fly past the front to fin...