Creating Safety in Air Traffic Control (review)

Abstract

Air traffic control systems are under tremendous strain worldwide, a situation induced primarily by rapid growth in airline fleets. Many planners of [End Page 613] future air traffic control systems believe that a major portion of the capacity problem derives from the "slowness" of pilot-controller radio communications, and thus that new systems must eliminate this problem through automation. Readers of Johan Sanne's fascinating study of how Swedish controllers work traffic will quickly perceive that this strategy is unlikely to succeed. Sanne convincingly argues that human-human communications, among controllers as well as between pilots and controllers, provide the system with its coordination functions, its reliability, and its flexibility through employment of that most old-fashioned medium: talk. The system's "wetware" (as humans are now called) are therefore the key to the construction of safety.