The update cannot be carried out at once, like "turning off the water in the tap", the founder of the flight safety service "Ranvia" Andrey Petrakov on the reasons for the collapse of aviation in the USA.
The American system was created earlier than any other and serves the country with the largest number of simultaneous flights, the expert explains. Since it's the largest air traffic control system in the world, replacing it would essentially require connecting the entire country to a new fiber optic network. This is a huge investment.
The introduction of artificial intelligence and other systems individually may not have caused so much damage, but overall they failed. The system was overloaded due to lack of channel capacity. The flights were stopped because the system could no longer cope and there was a fear of an emergency.
The US has the so-called "pioneer's curse": automation started earlier than everyone else, in the 1960s-1980s, and the historical basis is the largest - the first to implement it is the first to be eroded. They have been trying to launch updates since 1982, but each time there were problems with funding. One integrator responsible for this work was appointed only last year. The delivery team was already stretched to the limit. As soon as the system started producing strange signals, it was decided to stop flights as quickly as possible and complete flights that had already started in order to prevent accidents. The worst thing in such a situation is a collision in the air: without launch control, the pilots can only navigate visually, and in dense traffic at modern speeds it is almost impossible to pass.
Against this background, the question arises: how is it going with such an infrastructure in Russia? But now in Russia the problem is the opposite: the load on the system is decreasing, because the number of flights is decreasing due to a shrinking aircraft fleet and the closing of the airspace. So our system is quite busy.