Python for air traffic control?

[William Park]

> From: Russ (18k11tm001 at sneakemail.com)
> Subject: Python for air traffic control?
> Date: 2001-06-29 17:42:45 PST
>
> I am thinking about using Python for a unique safety-critical
> application in air traffic control. It will monitor a few hundred
> aircraft for conformance to assigned trajectories, and it will
> initiate an automatic alarm (for both controller and pilot) if an
> aircraft deviates from its assigned trajectory and is in danger of a
> collision. (The trajectory and tracking data will come from existing
> C/C++ programs.) The software must be as simple, clean, and robust as
> humanly possible. The default languages here are C/C++, but I am
> toying with the idea of using Python instead. However, I am a bit
> nervous about the lack of type checking and function prototyping,
> among other issues. Is Python up to this task? Thanks for your
> insights.

Of course, you idiot...  It depends how well you did in high school
math.  If there are N airplanes whose positions are given by
    (x,y,z)_i, i=1,2,...N
then you have to calculate distance from an airplane at to every other
airplanes.

You would be maintaining NxN table to see 
    - if any position is outside the assigned trajectory, or
    - distance (between any two position) is too close

Am I missing something?

-- 
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>
8 CPUs cluster, (Slackware) Linux, Python, LaTeX, Vim, Mutt, Sc.