Often when I’m watch aviation videos involving incidents, it seems the pilots are frequently preoccupied with talking to the company and ATC often waiting for this outcome as well.
It has me wondering if pilots and ATC should just have more authority in these situations? The company often seems like a middle man in some circumstances.
I’ll add, I used to work for an airline. We had a NOC with screens everywhere, meteorologist, airplane data feeds, PAX customer service, etc.
No real life pilot here, so I expect there’ll be airliner pilots who’ll jump in this thread and share more valuable feedback, but I take it that the pilots will talk directly to The Company and/or wait for ACARS input from The Company, mostly (but not only) during technical issues? About which ATC can do little anyway, as they do not have telemetry of the aircraft, nor are they specialists. They’re more there as traffic wardens than anything else.
Even if the pilots have no technical issues but want to get basic info such as weather forecasts, it’d probably be easier to make asynchronous calls in The Company’s centre of operations, who after all are dedicated to supporting their own fleet and have their tailored processes, rather than ATC who’s trying to service everyone within vicinity.
I’m reading that in the next decade aviation industry expects ACARS to evolve into a much more feature-rich platform (IPS), so I can only assume the dependence on ATC will decrease even further and the aircraft will be in constant 2-way communication with The Company’s NOC.
ps: it’s another story whether pilots in distress are sometimes focusing on communicating with The Company much more than they should, thus worsening the situation.This is possibly a consequence of how in recent years of omnipreset automations, the average Pilot has eventually evolved into an Operator.
i don’t know that i would support creating an ops center for each airline. There still needs to be some sort of communication between everyone. If everyone was doing whatever they wanted per their company’s ops center i could see more conflict arise. Like “nu huh i got the runway first i’m going” or “bro i’m way closer i’m landing first you go around.” You would still need someone local in the region to file pilots safely into the airport and a ground controller to move everyone around safely. You could reduce TRACON to a sort of help desk for navigation and weather assistance but there would still need to be someone watching to make sure two planes flying opposite directions on the same track aren’t going to hit each other; Airline Ops centers would need the same radar system as TRACON
I’m not saying we can’t have nice things with our ACARS, but we can’t sacrifice safety for convenience at least when it comes to aviation.
That’s more it. I watch too many of those incident shows.