One of the challenges I imagine you'll face as you move towards active advisory is that the more an alerting tool is relied upon, the more an absence of a flag from it is considered a positive signal that things are fine. "I didn't hear from Enhanced Radar, so we don't need to worry about ___" is a situation where a hallucinated silence of the alerting tool could contribute to danger, even if it's billed as an "extra" safety net.
I imagine that aviation regulatory bodies have high standards for this - a tool being fully additive to existing tools does not necessarily mean that it's cleared for use in a cockpit or in an ATC tower, right? Do you have thoughts about how you'll approach this? Also curious from a broader perspective - how do you sell any alerting tool into a niche that's highly conscious of distractions, and of not just false positive alerts but false negatives as well?
Yes, fair points. In talking to controllers, this has already come up. There are a few systems that do advisory alerting and controllers have expressed some frustration because each alert triggers a bunch of paperwork and they are not 100% relevant.
There are lots of small steps on this ladder.
The first is post-operational. You trigger an alert async and someone reviews it after the fact. Tools like this help bring awareness to hot spots or patterns of error that can be applied later in real time by the human controller.
A step up from that is real-time alerting, but not to the main station controller. There's always a manager in the tower that's looking over everyone's shoulder and triaging anything that comes up. That person is not as focused on any single area as the main controllers. There's precedence for tools surfacing alerts to the manager, and then they decide whether it's worth stepping in. This will probably be where our product sits for a while.
The bar to get in front of an active station controller is extremely high. But it's also not necessary for a safety net product like this to be helpful in real time.
I imagine that aviation regulatory bodies have high standards for this - a tool being fully additive to existing tools does not necessarily mean that it's cleared for use in a cockpit or in an ATC tower, right? Do you have thoughts about how you'll approach this? Also curious from a broader perspective - how do you sell any alerting tool into a niche that's highly conscious of distractions, and of not just false positive alerts but false negatives as well?