Planes have GPS trackers. Not only their company knows where they are, the control center can too. In the case of the north atlantic track system, air control keeps a tight eye on speed, altitude and separation with very precise measurements, even as airplanes are far away from land.

I just fail to see the point of this post. I recently hitched a ride on the cockpit jump seat of a modern airplane for a Europe-East Coast flight and during that I saw the air traffic control knowing exactly where we were, and the pilots communicating via text message (ACARS) with control, as well as using satellite links to contact dispatch (via text messages), as well as satellite phone calls.

Pilots keep paper around them because pilots are there to maintain control, and paper is just another failsafe (with pretty good reliability record!).

Bonus: some planes can notice alterations in the flight dynamics and report an ice buildup. No pilot in this planet is going to let any external person input flight parameters remotely into their aircraft's system while they are in the air.

sure you can create an automated dispatch system on an iPad. How do you authenticate it? how do you tell if its not working? does it fail safe? Making safe software is hard, and well beyond the wit of your standard programmer.

After all, can you gaurentee your software when the CPU is at 100%? can you say with certainty what happens when your CPU is hammered by all the interrupts at the same time?

Everything in the whole stack has to be verified. Thats means no virutalisation, no ruby, no perl, no python no ethernet. You can have firewire 400 though.

One can almost guarantee that this plane crash did not crash because of a failure in ATC<->Pilot communication.

I'm not saying that things couldn't be better (and I'm no expert at all) but I doubt that any of these new technologies would have saved MH370.

It's very weird, for instance, that the ground station that reports to flightracker24 lost ADS-B communication with the plane all of a sudden and it's pretty clear from the number of planes that you can see in the area that it is probably not a coverage issue.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transponder_(aviation)

First, I agree with your thesis. In fact, I'd argue General Aviation is stuck in the 1950s. Lots of reasons for that, including the cost of insurance.

Second, I had a hard time reading this, as you seem to lack the ability to form cohesive paragraphs. Very sorry to have to tell you, but I figured somebody should. Nobody can read a big wall of text where each paragraph is trying to say several different things at the same time.

Best of luck in future drafts.

I ask you to envision the logistics of a simple change. You want to implement X, and gee-whiz do I have some cool, new technology that makes it easy!!

Okay. Let's start. If we make mistakes people die, and careers end. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about motivations re that, but all I'll say is as an engineer I only ever focused on the former. So, huge testing and verification effort to show that my gee-whiz technology that works in some consumer device has acceptably low failure modes, does not negatively affect pilot work flow, can work under the conditions of flight (-55C to 70C anyone?), over the wide performance characteristics (high G, high vibration, salt water, high radiation), and so on.

Okay, you did all that! Let's start bolting it on the planes!

No.

Let's write and get approved training programs for all the maintenance workers. Then, let's train them - across the whole world. Let's write and get approved training programs for the pilot. We will fit it into their refresher training, have new mandated training, or what? Basically, rewrite all the training curriculum that is out there. Get it into the schools, so the pilots coming fresh out of school aren't behind. Again, across the world.

Oh, this interfaces with the towers? Okay, so do all that again with the towers. Hmm, you want this 2013 technology to seamlessly integrate with some core memory technology - that should be easy. Perform a study, put out RFQs, get bids, select the best bidder, have them build the system, manage them through the cost overrun, opps, 3 months before deployment Congress mandates that that core-memory system be retired, and oh, how will this work in the 168 other countries?

Got that sorted. No, wait, no one in the tower knows how to use it, no one knows how to install it, no one knows how to maintain it. Let's throw money and time at that! Oh, unions. I hate unions. ATCs have a union. This could take awhile....

Finally, it is 2020, and I am rolling out, um, 7 year old technology that is entirely obsolete and no longer supported by the manufacturers. Oh, they'll support it if you throw enough money at it - get your $5 microprocessor at $1000 a pop.

Meanwhile, the entire world is filled with aircraft still using the old system. So, we mandate a phase-out by 2035. Just another 15 years of supporting the old and new systems in parallel. I'm sure that'll be pretty cheap.

People who work in the field will rightly accuse me of hand waving, and especially of over-exaggerating some difficulties (not every modernization project hits every possible snag that exists). But this is still a useful sketch the scope of the problem. I've spent time talking to very high people in the FAA. They are not unaware of the old systems and their limitations, nor are they bumbling bureaucrats (pet peeve - it is easy to villanize faceless people, and that is very lazy thinking). We in industry are forever proposing new ideas, better technology, and so on (let's face it, they are all trying to feed at the trough of government spending, and getting your system mandated is a company maker). But the price tag for my handy,dandy system is at the noise level compared to the cost of the logistics of deployment.

I am not arguing that there is nothing to be done, or that everyone is working maximally efficiently right now. Certainly the US is behind other countries in some areas of aviation technology. But it is not in any way a trivial problem, one of "just bolt a new radio to the plane and trash the old ecosystem".

edit: consider, for example, the Rockwell Collins DTU-7000 Data Transfer Module (https://www.rockwellcollins.com/sitecore/content/Data/Produc...). This is absolutely modern hardware in the aviation world. It is PCMCIA. And how exciting it was to get. You would not believe the cost and size of the old system - we would jealously keep tracking logs of, I forget, a few MB of flash memory units that cost thousands and thousands (and thousands) of dollars. There is some even more modern stuff being rolled out that uses usb. But consider, when this is something that contains your flight plan, your maps, and so on, the cost of a stray gamma ray blowing away a byte. Mull on how much testing this hardware goes through. And then factor in all of the logistics above. We already don't have money to own the old system, and now I have to go to all this further expense, to save what is truly chump change (that thousands and thousands and thousands number) in the end? Millions to save thousands.

Of course, we have to modernize, we can't store rich maps on tiny memory, so we spend, and spend, and spend. And then get a front page HN story about how old everything is! Well, there's a reason for that.

Now imagine that everybody on the alternative secret phone system is flying around hundreds of passengers who'll be killed if somebody misdirects a call with important instructions.

I've found that, in general, if one's reaction to a practice is "WTF, is literally everybody else in this industry stoopid?" it usually means the opposite...

  MH370/MAS370
  Boing 777-2H6ER
  Registration 9M-MRO
  Altitude 0ft
  Speed 471 kt
  Track 40°
  Vertical Speed 0 fpm
  Lattitude: 6.97
  Longitude: 103.63
  Radar: F-WMKC1
  Squawk: 2157

That particular airplane was delivered new to Malaysia Airlines in May 2002 and was involved in a ground mishap in 2012. While taxiing at Shanghai's Pudong airport, its wingtip hit the tail of another aircraft. According to an independent accident-tracking site, the damage suffered by the Boeing 777 was "substantial.": http://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=147571

Pilots get weather forecasts before take-off, are they inadequate? How does knowing the weather at the destination help with the immediate task of flying a plane through a thunderstorm that you knew was going to be there anyway and you can see on your radar?

How more weather information change the impact of a major weather event e.g. East Coast winter storm, on air travel? I don't see how it could, the decisions are made far ahead of time because weather forecasts are pretty good.

Purposefully staying behind the technology curve is not a "safe" strategy, aviation is not alone in this obsolete thinking bias, the same is seen in utility, automobile industry too.

Really? When you have to worry about things like "Squelch" in order to deal with voltage supply ground noise? You are on thin ground.

The real problem with modern technology is that the pilot can't rely on it. Sure, a digital radio is $1,000 (or less). However, the digital radio that is FAA certified will be expensive and nobody is going to develop it because the FAA won't require it because all the pilots will bitch that it is too expensive.

In the era of having artificial hearts and pacemakers that are helping better lives, I don't think its as hard to even build sound and safe automated flying systems.

those 3 should probably be added to current planes, regardless.

i'm not sure why you think there is a single system with a "CPU" in a plane either. there's multiple independent systems - some electronic, some analog.

all this not much to do with visualization or python, in fact... and software glitches in planes do happen, by the way.

author's point is that we could do better using today's technology.