It has to do with how ATC needs to be able to communicate with all planes in the air, even ones built 100 years ago. They have to use radio so everyone can hear everyone else. There’s no other technology that is as ubiquitous as radio, so they have to work with what they’ve got. Upgrading to other stuff would be an absolute nightmare, though they are making progress on less critical fronts.
Couldn't comms broadcast in multiple parallel modes, like cell phone traffic?: More clear (probably digital) transmissions in on band, and for backward compatibility, old radio transmissions in another.
I think one of the best things they could add would be an electronic drawing tablet for ATC to draw a flight path on a map and pipe it directly into the pilots EFIS or HUD. It's not fool-proof, but in high density airspace, it seems more efficient to be able to draw a curve and press a button than try to verbally describe it. Of course one major pitfall is you cannot draw in 3D.
and in this case, the pilot loaded the wrong waypoint (likely from another runway) and flew toward it. It's not slower, either. have you ever entered a waypoint into a flight computer? they aren't exactly built for speed.
Making the traffic controller load a flight plan into the plane’s computer merely changes who will make the mistake. If you want to suggest changes, suggest something that actually has a chance of reducing the rate of errors.
Besides, pilots don’t just blindly follow the waypoints on their computer. The pilots would have spent half an hour before they even got in the airplane reviewing the plan for the flight. This includes reviewing the published departure information for the airport. In that briefing they would have specifically noted that the direction they will turn after takeoff depends on which runway the tower tells them to take off from. They cannot necessarily guess which runway that’ll be in advance.
They already have something better than that. It's called a published departure procedure that pilots are supposed to follow. In this case, one of the pilots failed to follow the published departure procedure and came close to being on the next season of Mayday: Air Disaster.
The paths would be repetitive. Wouldn't it be great if, instead of drawing a new path in 3D space every single time someone files a flight plan, someone studied the area surrounding the airport, taking into account obstacles, traffic, the fact that there's a residential neighborhood on one end of the airport that shouldn't be bothered at night, and prevailing wind patterns, and drew all those 3D paths through the sky and published them for everyone to use, so that traffic follows known predictable paths?
And in the case of a deviation, would it be faster to pick up a stylus, draw a new path in 3D space, click send, and wait for a message acknowledging that... or someone yelling "27 alpha turn right heading 270 immediately"?
