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The actual order is here: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/FAA-Emergency-Order-11-6-25.pdf

Unfortunately, the article title is somewhat incomplete, as the restriction on commercial rocket launches is only for certain hours (for now, at least):

> Accordingly, with respect to commercial space launches and reentries, under the authority provided to the FAA Administrator by 49 U.S.C. §§ 40103, 40113, and 46105(c), and authority delegated to the FAA Administrator under 51 U.S.C. § 50909(a), it is hereby ordered that, beginning at 6:00 a.m. EST on November 10, 2025, and until this Order is cancelled, Commercial space launches and reentries will only be permitted between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. local time.

The article mentions the hours...

> Beginning 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT) on Nov. 10, commercial launches to space can only take place between the hours of 10 p.m. EST (0300 GMT) and 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT), according to the FAA order.

Right, hence "the article title is somewhat incomplete".

I just wanted to make that clear since not everyone reads the article before hopping into the comments and the title could be easily interpreted to prohibit all rocket launches.

LOCAL, not EST.

These orders, while written like they're orders, seem to be suggestions? They first ordered 20% flight reductions at major hubs, and 10% at minor hubs. Now the airlines have cancelled low single digit percentages. This is easily viewable at flightaware. https://www.flightaware.com/live/cancelled/today

I really want this to be the thing that pushes the industry into automated air traffic control.

It's not even technically difficult - we only allow error-prone humans to do the job because of inertia.

Build the system now, and then next time there is a government shutdown or shortage of air traffic controllers, we can say 'only planes equipped with an ipad with automatic air traffic control are allowed to fly'. Within 24h every plane in the nation will be equipped.

ATC is hundreds of functions and dozens of responsibilities like checking that the runway is safe to land. "Clear to land" is not just a turn of phrase, it is a check and verify that an aircraft with hundreds of people is relying on.

Air traffic is not a deterministic system, it is squishy and significantly more complicated because it involves humans, complex mechanical systems, and weather floating on top of a sea of limited resources.

Automating just the error prone radio calls would be a massive start.

Those could be sent as short text messages that appear on a screen in the cockpit, for the pilots to acknowledge receipt of with a limit set of responses, and would give ATC a lot more time to focus on their other duties.

So like texting and driving, but in the air? Flying is hard, I don’t think an automated text based system would be safer than what we have now.

Try responding to the strongest possible interpretation of what someone says.

Anyway, this wasn’t my idea, it came from one of the handful of active / recently retired commercial pilots on YouTube.

This is already being done at many major airports through the FAA Data Comm program.

https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/data-communications-data-comm-0

In some ways, they started in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_Air_Transporta...

There are a ton of details on the page that go into why it is so hard. One reason is that there are a lot of fundamental things to build and deploy before anything can be automated. E.g. before ADS-B (equipment on planes that detects its own location with GPS and automatically broadcasts it), ATC needed to talk to pilots and ask them where they were in a lot of cases. ADS-B has only been required on commercial flights since 2020.

Then it also suffers like every large government software project where a bunch of $100+ million contracts get paid out to private companies while nothing gets built. And it's part of annual appropriations, so funding was unpredictable. It's like working at a software company that had a major layoff or hiring spree every year for the last 20 years. If we could figure out how to run major project, the value to humanity would be enormous.

This is a ludicrously short sighted post. Do you know what ATC actually involves? It involves talking, via voice, to annoying bags of meat over analog radio.

We are very, very, very far from automated ATC. We can't even get automatic TRAINS to work reliably and thats a far simpler problem.

Copenhagen has an automated metro system.

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We can’t trust general use self driving cars yet. Air traffic control is a bit riskier than that

Completely different things. Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead. Comparing their risk is a complete apples and oranges situation.

Than again, ATC needs to deal with people talking on the radio, so the current system has a really long way to go to be completely automated.

> Self driving cars need to actually deal with vision and fuzzy real time response. Air traffic is a planning and scheduling task with known constraints and (in most cases) known minutes ahead.

It's funny to read all of these confident comments claiming ATC is easily automated from people who obviously don't understand what ATC entails.

ATC isn't just planning and scheduling. There is a lot of quick thinking and communication with pilots. You might only be thinking of the everything-goes-perfectly-right case, but the real value of having trained ATC operators is handling all of the edge cases and making quick decisions under high pressure scenarios that may not have even been represented in the training set.

ATC is also partially a visual job. Did you ever notice that there's literally a tower at the airport for air traffic control people? The people in this tower will manage things like traffic on the ground and immediate airspace around the tower. Visual inputs and critical thinking skills are very necessary.

Air traffic also requires the use of visual skills - and it’s harder than driving because of the small target size and wide field of view.

“See and avoid” has a very high priority in the cockpit - not everything out there is on radar, not everything on radar is under ATC control.

Also remember that ATC is vital for emergency situations. "Your distress call is important to us, please continue screaming into the void and hopefully a miracle happens.

Speak for yourself. I ride in Waymos frequently.

There’s a lot of automation that can be done to reduce the workload of controllers.

Making an autopilot for airplanes is significantly easier than cars.

It's always hilarious to see ignorant developers on HN claiming that real world engineering problems are easy to solve based on zero actual knowledge or experience. This kind of comment is really peak HN.

An autopilot for airplanes is only "easy" until something goes wrong. For example, one failure mode for autopilots is that if the aircraft gets progressively more and more out of trim the autopilot will automatically compensate until it hits its design limit. Then it suddenly disengages, leaving the human pilots in manual control of a nearly uncontrollable aircraft. If you talk to an actual flight control engineer they can give you plenty more examples of why building a safe autopilot is quite hard.

That’s a nice strawman you’re creating there.

An aircraft has fewer and simpler variables to deal with than ground vehicle.

If a ground vehicle runs a red light, it’s potentially fatal error. There are more of these for a car than there are for an airplane.

You don’t have to write automation to avoid hitting trees in a plane. An airplane just needs terrain data and a few algorithms.

There are a few enough airplanes and airplane manufacturers that you could regulate a specific algorithm for traffic avoidance.

> There are more of these for a car than there are for an airplane.

Half of this comment section has strangely simplified ideas of how airplanes work and how a flight might get into trouble.

It's crazy that so many comments are convinced that completely automating airplane flight is some relatively trivial problem.

Those comments are coming from people whose aviation "knowledge" was learned by playing Ace Combat on Xbox and watching Snakes on a Plane. Totally disconnected from reality.

That's a nice strawman you're creating there. In some airspace classes and flight regimes an aircraft has more variables, especially when you account for possible failures. If an aircraft has a mechanical failure it can't just pull over and stop.

There are about 46000 aircraft registered in the USA, plus more that sometimes fly in from foreign countries. Many aircraft were manufactured decades ago by companies that no longer exist so major upgrades aren't economically practical.

And yet it was done decades ago. Air traffic control is just as solvable.

"Done" in what sense? Do you even understand how autopilots work and how limited they are?

So why did we have airplane autopilots decades before car autopilots if it's not easier?

"Easier" != "easy"

This is such a strange comment section.

Airplane autopilot is more like the cruise control feature in your car, not a self-driving computer that does everything for the pilots while they sit back.

Car autopilot and airplane autopilot don't share much in common other than the word "autopilot"

Airplane autopilots are basically just cruise control.

You still have a human in the loop double checking everything constantly and stepping in as soon as something isn’t routine (which is actually quite frequently).

But the stakes are much higher.

On a side note, I will use this thread to air out my biggest pet peeve - air travel isn't in fact safer than car travel. Well, it is, per mile, but that's cheating because planes travel so fast. Obviously a 3 hour commercial flight is safer than 40 hours of driving. But cars are still safer per journey.

So, if you drive to the airport and get on a flight, your car ride wasn't actually more dangerous than your flight as the saying goes. The only road-based transportion more dangerous than a plane is the bicycle.

Commercial air travel has a passenger fatality on something like one in ten million flights [0], and less than that on newer aircraft.

Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles. [1]

So maybe you are technically correct. Barely. And it has nothing to do with airplanes being fast — planes only need to go a few tens of miles per trip to be significantly safer than cars, and plane trips are a lot longer than that.

[0] https://www.airsafe.com/events/models/rate_mod.htm

[1] https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...

> Automobile travel in the US has 1-2 fatalities per 100M miles.

Which is vanishingly small.

It means the average drive can expect to be a fatality in an automobile accident once ever one to two hundred years or more.

From https://usafacts.org/articles/is-flying-safer-than-driving/

> In 2022, the fatality rate for people traveling by air was .003 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The death rate people in passenger cars and trucks on US highways was 0.57 per 100 million miles.

Planes travel about 10x-20x faster than cars, but that’s still 0.06 vs 0.57. Seems like quite a difference. Which numbers are you using?

The announcement say 4% Friday increase to 10% next week gradual ramp

Source: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/FAA-Emergency-Order-11-6-25.pdf

The order also only applies to domestic flights, so observed percentages on flightaware will be lower than those in the order.

Oh, also:

1. When an FAA owned and operated facility does not have adequate staffing levels, ATC may elect not to provide the following services:

a. Radar Traffic Information Service;

b. Radar Assistance to visual flight rule (VFR) aircraft;

c. Terminal Radar Services for VFR aircraft;

d. VFR Traffic Pattern Operations;

e. Practice Approaches to VFR aircraft;

f. Flight checks services to restore inoperable equipment and approaches;

g. ATC services to parachute operations; or,

h. ATC services to certain special or unusual operations

Given the current situation, cutting back on private aviation to allow our air traffic controllers, who are picking up second jobs, seems prudent.

Prudent, yes. But are all of those private aviation? Doesn't commercial civilian and military aviation include any VFR flights? Some of them also sound like emergency/rescue operations.

> commercial launches to space can only take place between the hours of 10 p.m. EST (0300 GMT) and 6 a.m. EST (1100 GMT),

That's going to really piss off everyone around Ventura, CA (they get the sonic-boom when landing a booster on a barge for most launch trajectories from Vandenberg).

As someone who lives close enough to Vandenberg to watch launches from my front porch, this is going to really be disruptive. Squeezing all the launches into the overnight hours is going to be rough.

I thought they were currently addressing any risks by restricting air traffic?

Officially no reason to ever visit Florida now

I wonder how that sack of shit feels, now that he’s affected slightly by the government shutdown. Surely this is peak government efficiency right here, with essential personnel being made to work without being paid.

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Many ketamine addicts feel better than me. If I took it personally, I'd be dead.

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Which commercial rocket launches care about planetary alignments?

From TFA: "One launch hoping to get off the ground before the order goes into effect is NASA's ESCAPADE mission to Mars. The Rocket Lab-built twin orbiters are scheduled to liftoff on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket at 2:45 p.m. EST (1945 GMT) on Nov. 9. The impending restrictions mean the ESCAPADE mission won't have a chance to reset for a second launch attempt if the Nov. 9 liftoff is scrubbed for some reason."

So it sounds like Blue Origin would be concerned

Those which are launching payloads outside of Earth orbit. However the launch windows for those tend to be wider and not rely on time of day so much. It's the rockets that need to hit a particular slot in Earth orbit that need to launch at an exact time of day.

Most (all?) NASA spacecraft fly on commercial launches these days.

There pretty much aren't any other kinds these days. The only noncommercial launcher currently flying is SLS, and "currently flying" is a bit of a stretch. The last launch was three years ago and the next one won't be until next year at the earliest.

It's right in the article:

"One launch hoping to get off the ground before the order goes into effect is NASA's ESCAPADE mission to Mars. The Rocket Lab-built twin orbiters are scheduled to liftoff on a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket at 2:45 p.m. EST (1945 GMT) on Nov. 9. The impending restrictions mean the ESCAPADE mission won't have a chance to reset for a second launch attempt if the Nov. 9 liftoff is scrubbed for some reason."

Don't forget that commercial launches may still have a government/science org as their customer in question.

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There is no need for namecalling. This is HN. Please be respectful of your fellow commenters, even if you think they're being a walnut.

You’re right. But the correct response is to flag, not comment.

(I’m commenting because I love the insult and already know I am going to call everyone I love or respect a walnut for a few weeks.)

> But the corrext response is to flag, not comment.

Oh? Apologies then. Either I did not realize or I didn't remember. Either way, I'll try my best to remember in the future! Thanks!

Also, yes, I love the insult too when used in a friendly way.

> Oh? Apologies then

None owed. You walnut :)

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If this were really about safety it would be all rockets, not just commercial. It's not like saying "nobody fly in this area at this time" is actually difficult.

Which non-commercial rockets are launching these days? Isn't pretty much everything public outsourced to commercial operators?

SLS, minuteman, I'm sure there are others

In most years we have about 3 LGM‑30 Minuteman launches and 0 SLS launches. This will not be a problem.