As a commercial pilot, your response is a little glib and kind of ignores the meaningful advances that have been made with D-ATIS, ADS-B In, CPDLC, DUATS, XM weather, etc. Voice is absolutely not perfect, analog FM audio often comes through garbled, pilots have to wait their turn on a busy single-user channel for timely information, etc.
This doesn't even begin to touch on the complexities that will come from full integration of drones and eVTOL into the national airspace, which will absolutely swamp a one-speaker-at-a-time analog FM comms system.
Just a nit, but aircraft/airport communications use AM not FM. This is deliberate, because FM's "capture effect" would mask other transmissions that inevitably occur when two parties randomly press PTT at the same time. With AM, you'll hear a tone, which is the difference frequency between the two transmitters, so you'll know that somebody missed something, and it will probably be repeated. If it were FM only, it would be less obvious that some communications were missed.
Yeah I probably over reacted. But the knee jerk reactions I've seen to some perfectly reasonable systems just wear you down.
You raise good points but I would be very surprised to see digital data streams ever replace voice, and drone control is just a completely different problem. But as you say we'll see.
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As a commercial pilot, your response is a little glib and kind of ignores the meaningful advances that have been made with D-ATIS, ADS-B In, CPDLC, DUATS, XM weather, etc. Voice is absolutely not perfect, analog FM audio often comes through garbled, pilots have to wait their turn on a busy single-user channel for timely information, etc.
This doesn't even begin to touch on the complexities that will come from full integration of drones and eVTOL into the national airspace, which will absolutely swamp a one-speaker-at-a-time analog FM comms system.
Just a nit, but aircraft/airport communications use AM not FM. This is deliberate, because FM's "capture effect" would mask other transmissions that inevitably occur when two parties randomly press PTT at the same time. With AM, you'll hear a tone, which is the difference frequency between the two transmitters, so you'll know that somebody missed something, and it will probably be repeated. If it were FM only, it would be less obvious that some communications were missed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_effect
I appreciate the correction, anonymousiam! You are absolutely right - it's AM and for exactly the reasons you articulate.
Yeah I probably over reacted. But the knee jerk reactions I've seen to some perfectly reasonable systems just wear you down.
You raise good points but I would be very surprised to see digital data streams ever replace voice, and drone control is just a completely different problem. But as you say we'll see.