The TRACON is more like the enroute center than it is like the tower. Did you spend enough time with TMU to realize that the only ways to reduce delays due to volume is to increase the capacity of the airport or reduce the number of departures to the airport?
BOS learned that lesson well, and they cut everybody’s delay time significantly by allowing a circling approach to a shorter runway (ceiling permitting). Not everybody can make the approach, but the ones that can are exempt from the delays because they don’t use a scarce resource.
Again, keeping the vectors from intersecting is a tiny fraction of the job of controlling, even if that is what they mostly do. The big fraction is stuff like identifying the symptoms of hypoxia in pilots, talking the passenger of a heart attack victim onto a runway, and giving the pilot of an Airbus with severe birdstrike damage every option available.
Humans scale very well when you can divide their responsibilities clearly; the workload of a controller in a sector that has N operations per hour scales roughly with N, regardless of the size of the sector within reasonable limits. A computer system that identified and suggested corrections and changes in the enroute (or even the TRACON) environment would probably improve safety, but it would only reduce delays if it was responsible for maintaining specified separation on final, and did a better job than humans do. There are a lot of failure modes in vectoring for a final.
When you characterize controllers as being ambivalent about safety and acting to preserve their jobs, you are victim of and contributing to a false stereotype of unions and union employees. Everyone in professional aviation takes safety very seriously, and no silicon-based computer system currently in existence can respond to novel situations as well as a human can.
The TRACON is more like the enroute center than it is like the tower. Did you spend enough time with TMU to realize that the only ways to reduce delays due to volume is to increase the capacity of the airport or reduce the number of departures to the airport? BOS learned that lesson well, and they cut everybody’s delay time significantly by allowing a circling approach to a shorter runway (ceiling permitting). Not everybody can make the approach, but the ones that can are exempt from the delays because they don’t use a scarce resource. Again, keeping the vectors from intersecting is a tiny fraction of the job of controlling, even if that is what they mostly do. The big fraction is stuff like identifying the symptoms of hypoxia in pilots, talking the passenger of a heart attack victim onto a runway, and giving the pilot of an Airbus with severe birdstrike damage every option available. Humans scale very well when you can divide their responsibilities clearly; the workload of a controller in a sector that has N operations per hour scales roughly with N, regardless of the size of the sector within reasonable limits. A computer system that identified and suggested corrections and changes in the enroute (or even the TRACON) environment would probably improve safety, but it would only reduce delays if it was responsible for maintaining specified separation on final, and did a better job than humans do. There are a lot of failure modes in vectoring for a final. When you characterize controllers as being ambivalent about safety and acting to preserve their jobs, you are victim of and contributing to a false stereotype of unions and union employees. Everyone in professional aviation takes safety very seriously, and no silicon-based computer system currently in existence can respond to novel situations as well as a human can.