As an air traffic controller, the last thing you want is the catastrophic failure of your technology infrastructure.
And thankfully it doesn’t usually happen like that. More often, there is a gradual degradation as one part of the system or another collapses. Perhaps the communications die, the radar falls over or the computers crash, or maybe some of the ground structure becomes unavailable as airports have to close.
Obviously, air traffic controllers are trained to deal with these situations but could the air traffic itself be made more robust. Maxime Gariel and Eric Feron, from the Georgia Institute of technology in Atlanta, argue that it could and have even come up with a way of evaluating it.
They’ve studied various types of high-density, highly structured aircraft traffic and worked out how difficult it becomes to handle as information about it begins to fail. It turns out, they say, that certain types of traffic structure are easier to handle than others as the infrastructure degrades.
So if you’re at all worried about the introduction of Free Flight (where aircraft essentially manage their own traffic control in most areas), you needn’t be. Gariel and Feron say it ain’t any worse than the current system should the air traffic control system go tits up.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0801.4750: Graceful Degradation of Air Traffic Operations