by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-26 16:24:05+00:00
Plane loses radio communication on final approach and ignores go-around orders, lands on occupied runway as ATC gets others out of the way [1]

Trivially handled by video game-grade AI. Is an aircraft somewhere it's not supposed to be, or doing something it's not supposed to be doing (most likely because a human has screwed up somewhere?) Route everything else out of the area, signal authorities. Human intervention not required.

Guy steals a plane and takes off without permission [2]

See above. What can ATC possibly do about this, besides alert other aircraft to the situation and signal law enforcement?

- Someone left some cones on a runway at JFK [3]

Foreign object detected or reported on runway, an everyday occurrence. Alert other aircraft and facilities personnel. What else is the controller going to do, go downstairs and pick up the cone?

Door blows off aircraft [4]

What is the controller supposed to do about this, other than accept the crew's request for an emergency landing and (guess what) route everybody else out of their way?

Some dude runs across the runways [5]

Like other 'surprises', two-legged FOD might have surprised the Wright brothers, but that's about it. Alert law enforcement and warn aircraft.

Pregnant woman giving birth on flight [6]

Just another routine 'surprise' covered by standard procedure. Handled primarily by the air crew rather than ATC. Handle emergency landing permission if requested by crew, alert medical personnel to meet the aircraft when it lands, done deal.

Student pilot freaks out, ATC calms her down and gets her instructor on frequency [7]

Honestly not sure what should be done to automate this kind of situation. I suppose an LLM could handle it as well as anyone else. :-P

See also the edge cases where the pilot(s) are incapacitated and an untrained civilian needs to be talked through the landing. How often does that happen in real life (and how often does it actually work?)

Earthquake [8]

Not really something ATC would be involved with except at the purely-tactical level. Ground outgoing traffic and reroute incoming flights until all-clear given by officials.

Pilot hits a deer [9]

Reroute traffic and alert medics.

Bomb threat on board, pilots decide to evacuate on the tarmac after no help arrives in ~1h [10]

Not an ATC issue except for the need to (guess what) reroute traffic.

They actively handle the traffic, and this task requires human pattern recognition and cross-domain reasoning skills in a matter of seconds, and the technology to replace this is simply not there yet. If you still disagree, I'd love to learn which technologies you'd apply to this problem and how they would compose with each other in order to achieve the same outcomes as in the cases I linked.

You could still have a valid overall point regarding the need for humans in the real-time loop, but I disagree that most of the scenarios you mention support that point. All of those cases can be (and are) anticipated, all of them have happened before except possibly [10], and all of them can be handled by computers at least as well as humans. Except possibly the situation with the pilot needing real-time psych support.

Let alone the fact that by AI we mean text models, so I'm not sure how they would integrate with terrain information, real-time radar data, arrival/departure routes, etc.

I definitely don't mean LLM-style text models. As I suggested in the first answer, nothing on this list except (again) #7 would have flummoxed a game programmer ten or twenty years ago. If some people want to try an ELIZA-like LLM to deal with #7, fine, but that would be a research problem. Nothing else on your list requires any new research.