Air Traffic Control

>>> 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' ... Read full article.