There is a certain class of person who will take something simple like, say, brake lights on a car, and extrapolate it out to industrial control systems of something incredibly complex with demanding safety requirements and "observe" "it can't be that hard can it?"
I remember a debate a year or two ago about a plane ignoring instructions (IIRC it had changed frequencies) and had taxiied onto a runway when a plane was landing. Luckily the landing plane saw this and do a go around so nobody was harmed.
In the aftermath, there were similar complaints to yours. "Why can't they just have lights to block planes when a departing or landing plane was using the runway?" without thinking through how any of that works. For a start:
- How do you allocate that a runway is "in use"?
- If ATC does it, what if they fail to turn the system on?
- What if turning it on or off fails?
- What if it gets stuck on or off? How do you fix it? Are there procedures for ATC to override it anyway?
- There are multiple entry points to a runway. What if they're in different states?
- What company si going to sell such a system and accept liability?
- What training requirements will be needed for ATC and the pilots?
- What do you do if a pilot goes ahead and ignores it?
I think people can't think beyond cars. Cars have had unimaginable effort put into them so they can only operate within a certain window. Even then they require maintenance.
But as soon as you scale up to industrial safety and control systems, a power plant, the engine on a ship, etc you will end up with a bunch of controls where the people using them need to be skilled operators and it is essentially impossible to eliminate mistakes with automation and IT systems. You will need overrides. You will need redundancies. You will need to end up doing things nobody has ever considered before and have to rely upon training, education and experience to go beyond the envelope. That's just how it works.
I remember a debate a year or two ago about a plane ignoring instructions (IIRC it had changed frequencies) and had taxiied onto a runway when a plane was landing. Luckily the landing plane saw this and do a go around so nobody was harmed.
In the aftermath, there were similar complaints to yours. "Why can't they just have lights to block planes when a departing or landing plane was using the runway?" without thinking through how any of that works. For a start:
- How do you allocate that a runway is "in use"?
- If ATC does it, what if they fail to turn the system on?
- What if turning it on or off fails?
- What if it gets stuck on or off? How do you fix it? Are there procedures for ATC to override it anyway?
- There are multiple entry points to a runway. What if they're in different states?
- What company si going to sell such a system and accept liability?
- What training requirements will be needed for ATC and the pilots?
- What do you do if a pilot goes ahead and ignores it?
I think people can't think beyond cars. Cars have had unimaginable effort put into them so they can only operate within a certain window. Even then they require maintenance.
But as soon as you scale up to industrial safety and control systems, a power plant, the engine on a ship, etc you will end up with a bunch of controls where the people using them need to be skilled operators and it is essentially impossible to eliminate mistakes with automation and IT systems. You will need overrides. You will need redundancies. You will need to end up doing things nobody has ever considered before and have to rely upon training, education and experience to go beyond the envelope. That's just how it works.