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Air Traffic Control
>>> 2025-05-11 air traffic control (PDF) Air traffic control has been in the news lately, on account of my country's declining ability to do it. Well, that's a long-term trend, resulting from decades of under-investment, severe capture by our increasingly incompetent defense-industrial complex, no small degree of management incompetence in the FAA, and long-lasting effects of Reagan crushing the PATCO strike.
Their role was mainly to provide pilots with information (including, critically, weather reports) and to keep loose tabs on air mail flights so that a disappearance would be noticed in time to send search and rescue. The advent of radar made GCI tremendously more powerful, allowing a relatively small number of radar-assisted air defense centers to monitor for inbound attack and then direct defenders with real-time vectors. During the 1950s, the newly minted Air Force worked closely with MIT's Lincoln Laboratory (an important center of radar research) and IBM to design a computerized, integrated, networked system for GCI.
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