Subject: Re: FAA’s Sean Duffey
Tell me you don't know anything about engineering without telling me you don't know anything about engineering.

What aspect of what I said would be better understood by an engineer?

Maybe we hire more ATCs?

Do you mean instead of offering buyouts to the ones who still remain? Then I agree. But what does that have to do with Elon Musk? That’s not an engineering problem.

Musk wants to impose his own plan to automate the air traffic control system. I have no problem with that as an intermediate to long range goal. But I don’t want Elon anywhere close to that. For one thing, he’d be on both sides of the government/contractor issue- a ginormous red flag for fraud. But most importantly, Elon has an experimental history rife with spectacular explosions of rockets and cars.

It can be argued that such is the progression of applied science, and that would be true. Another way of putting that is “We learn by our mistakes” and that is true as well. But Elon is cooking up a revolutionary scheme to automate our entire system of air traffic control- of taking humans out of the equation.

And I agree with that long term vision. It would be an engineering marvel.


But not at the price of a few, spectacular mid-air collisions. Elon would view that as simply the price to be paid for the advance of science (and his bottom line)

Caution and step by step advance is called for. NOT Elon’s usual mode of operations that is on full display at the moment-slash and burn the existing structure to the ground, then replace it with the new (untested) solution after the old system lies in smoking ruins.


Baby steps are called for if you want to automate air traffic control, Dope.

And Elon has never been one to tip toe through a technological minefield.

The price of one single slip up will not be a single rocket or Tesla, but will be human lives measured possibly in the hundreds.


Has Elon Musk ever shown any regard for the price that others pay to realize his dreams?


The FAA has been trying to train/hire more air traffic controllers for years. Trump and Elon have only made that problem worse.