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In computer-controlled blind landings, the U.S. is somewhat behind British aviation, which has already made 15,000 fully automatic test landings with six different kinds of planes. British pilots keep their hands entirely off the controls as the plane descends, while electronic devices operate the control surfaces and throttle all the way to touchdown. British aviation authorities may certify the VC-10 and other aircraft for fully automatic landings in zero-visibility conditions on regular passenger flights as early as 1969. But U.S. landing systems are also being perfected. Last month a Pan Am jet made a fully automatic landing at New York using a system developed jointly by Boeing and the Sperry Phoenix Co.
Back to the Shrimp Boats. Even while it evaluates these and other advanced air-traffic devices, the FAA has begun to install advanced radar traffic-control systems. Computerized alphanumeric systems are already in operation in air-traffic control centers in Atlanta, Jacksonville and New York, electronically printing the flight number, course and altitude next to the appropriate airliner blip on the radarscope. Eventually, FAA hopes to blanket U.S. airspace with alphanumeric coverage, providing a three-dimensional radar picture of all air traffic equipped with the necessary transponders.
Although the system was designed to take some of the pressure off harried FAA controllers, they themselves have found that alpha numerics poses a few problems of its own. To feed information about a flight into the radarscope and attach that information to the appropriate blip, for example, the controller must turn away from the screen to punch buttons on a computer input box, leaving his flights unattended for several vital seconds. In addition, as the alphanumeric data blocks move with their appropriate blips across the screen, they occasionally merge with data blocks from other flights, making both sets of data illegible. During heavy traffic, when the screen is crowded with blips and data, controllers switch off the alphanumeric system and go back to the traditional system of manually moving "shrimp boats"—plastic identification markers—across the screen with their appropriate blips.
Sheer necessity will no doubt soon mother the invention of improved alphanumeric systems. Necessity will also spur the development of fully automatic landing techniques, of collision warning systems, of more effective ways to control aircraft flying under visual flight rules. In the meantime, the bulk of the burden must be borne by the 14,000 controllers in towers and control centers. By intensive training and concentration, these highly trained men have learned to control as many as 21 radar blips—each representing an airplane—at a time. They have learned to steel themselves against confusion and panic, no matter how extreme the emergency. They have developed an intense but quiet pride in their talents, their responsibility and their record.