Texting While Flying: Help for Pilots

Texting While Flying: Help for Pilots

  
Montreal

Pilots and air-traffic controllers texting each other? OMG! Your airline flight is finally starting to communicate the way the rest of the world does.

 

 

Caroline Heroux sits at the air controller workstation in Montreal, with a view of her exchange with a Delta Air Lines flight in a dialogue box.
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Controllers and pilots aren't using their cellphones to text, even though many passengers now do using apps and in-flight Wi-Fi. Instead, planes with modern cockpit systems can log on to new systems at air-traffic control centers and link digitally. Rather than sometimes difficult radio calls, pilots and controllers simply send each other text messages to change altitudes, routes and hand off from one controller to the next.

 

The system has been in use for flights across oceans for several years. Canada now has it active across its domestic skies and European controllers have it in use in two large regions. But the U.S. is way behind.

By texting instead of talking, controllers have more time to process requests for airlines. Pilots sometimes request shortcuts or more-preferential routes based on wind shifts. And as planes burn fuel and lighten, pilots often want to climb to higher altitudes for smoother rides, faster speed and better fuel burn. Sometimes those requests don't get made or get put off or denied simply because controllers don't have time to coordinate new altitude and route assignments with other controllers along a plane's flight path. The chatter on radio frequencies can get intense.

 

If texting while flying sounds scary, relax. This isn't like texting while driving, because planes have two pilots-one flies, one communicates. And flying an airplane is all about working dials and reading instruments.

 

Air-traffic controllers say the best benefit is safety-miscommunication is the biggest source of air-traffic control errors. Over long-distance radio transmissions, numbers and instructions can easily be misheard. Sometimes pilots are preoccupied and miss radio calls for their flight. Sometimes instructions get read back inaccurately and must be repeated by the controller and read back again by the pilot. Sometimes transmissions get blocked because two people try to talk at the same time over the radio.

 

Controllers say it frequently can take two or three tries to get simple instructions to a flight crew, especially if English, the universal language of air-traffic control, isn't the pilot's primary language.

"If you look at a lot of accidents and incidents, you see multiple events. This is an opportunity to eliminate one of them. You're eliminating a source of potential error," said Sid Koslow, chief technology officer for Nav Canada, the privatized air-traffic control services provider for Canada.

 

This new system is expected to boost capacity and reduce delays, people in the industry say. Planes often must wait to take off so air-traffic controllers don't get overloaded with too many planes at once. Eurocontrol, the agency that coordinates and plans air-traffic control throughout Europe, says that once half of all airline flights in Europe are equipped to communicate by text message, controllers will be able to handle 8% more flights because their workload will be reduced by 16%. When 75% of airplanes have the equipment, 11% more planes will be able to fly simultaneously as a result of a 22% controller workload reduction.