If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.
You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!
delays, slots, flight plan updating, computer breakdown, no flight plan, flight plan conformity, flight plan processing, search and rescue, type of flight plan
Almost without fail, the question I get immediately following, “What do you do?” is, “Oh, so you work at the tower?” I’ve been a controller for nine years now, and no, I’ve never worked at a tower. I actually work in a big windowless building, nowhere near an airport. While the question irks some of us, it’s easy to see why it’s asked so often: The tower is one of the most recognizable landmarks of the flying experience. Of course the mainstream media almost never gets it right. Any time the news talks about ATC, we are referred to as the “controllers in the tower.” And the alternative misconception, that we are the crews on the ramp marshaling aircraft with the orange sticks, is no better. Let’s see if we can start clearing up just what we do as air traffic controllers.
ATC That You Can See
When you’re at an airport waiting for a flight, you can see all the hustle and bustle going on outside the windows – aircraft landing, departing and taxiing to and from the ramp. There are even other vehicles speeding about all the time. Every one of these is handled by people in the control tower. Even before your plane starts pushing back from the gate, the pilots are in contact with controllers, relaying information back and forth about their flight plan and taxi instructions to the runway.
Finally, with some patience, your pilots hear, “Cleared for takeoff.” The engines of your airplane roar to full power, you get pushed back in your seat, the rumble of the concrete suddenly becomes silky smooth and off you go. Everything beneath you becomes much smaller…and then what? It’s a big sky and the pilots have a flight plan, so they know where to go, right? Sixty years ago that may have been possible, but it is certainly not anymore. The airspace is far too busy and the airplanes far too fast for pilots to go it alone these days.
The National Airspace System (NAS)
On any average day, there are over 5,000 aircraft operating in the skies over the United States under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR). All of these flights are required to be controlled by ATC at all times in order to ensure proper separation with other aircraft. Flying IFR allows travel through clouds and adverse weather that can reduce visibility. There are countless more aircraft operating under Visual Flight Rules (VFR) that may or may not be getting ATC service. Visual rules puts separation responsibility solely on the pilots, so they are required to fly clear of weather and look outside the windows for other traffic.
Control facilities are divided up into three types (or environments): Tower, Terminal, and Enroute. All three come in different sizes and acronyms. An air traffic control tower (ATCT) can be anything from a small glass box on top of a mobile home to a dizzying three hundred foot obelisk at the center of a major international airport. Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facilities vary as well, from small single-screen operations that can be run within a tower cab to extremely complex “Large TRACONs,” which can encompass several busy airports. The third and biggest, the Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC), can handle traffic across multiple states and even huge chunks of ocean.
You can almost envision the three by thinking of the Interstate highway system between crowded cities. The airports are the busy, crowded cities. Terminal Approach Control airspace would be the interchanges, on and off ramps, and smaller highways in close proximity to the city. Finally, Enroute would be the long expanses of highways themselves, stretching cross-country.
The On Ramp (Terminal Approach Control)
So, back to our original story. What happens after your airplane leaves terra firma? After a short climb and maybe a turn or two, pilots are told to contact departure, one of the primary functions of a Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facility. A TRACON typically encompasses an area of airspace within 40 miles of a primary airport, up to 10,000 feet or a little higher. Departure controllers climb and turn aircraft on their way out of the TRACON’s airspace towards the Enroute Center (more on that below). Approach control is very tactical, working with small airspace with many aircraft within. It takes a lot of rapid, yet accurate decision making to keep things safe, orderly, and expeditious.
Along with departure, TRACON controllers also work arrival and satellite traffic. Arrival is responsible for funneling and blending multiple streams of aircraft into single file lines in order to land. If you are near an airport and see a long line of lights off into the horizon, the “string of pearls,” you are seeing the result of an arrival controller’s work. Being able to guide aircraft from several different directions into a steady, consistent final approach takes expert timing and precision. “Pearls” are a source of pride for any approach controller.
While arrival is generally touted as the top of the food chain, satellite operations can often be even more difficult and complex. Satellite airports are scattered all around, and even though a TRACON usually only has one primary airport, these other fields also need air traffic control service. Chicago Midway, Dallas Love, and Fort Lauderdale are all satellite airports to their larger counterparts, but still have abundant traffic. With the bulk of the nearby airspace being dedicated to the primary airport, satellite is usually reduced to lower altitudes and smaller corridors of airspace, making things a bit tricky.
So here we are, climbing above 10,000 feet. Departure has vectored your flight through the web of arrival traffic flows, and on course to your destination. The departure controller instructs you to “contact center.”
Highways and Byways (Enroute Center)
Image courtesy Federal Aviation Administration
The network of enroute centers is the backbone of the National Airspace System. There are twenty two ARTCC facilities in the United States, responsible for air traffic control service up to 60,000 feet over huge expanses of area. Some even handle oceanic operations over the Pacific and Atlantic. Each facility is staffed by roughly 250-350 controllers, weather specialists, traffic management coordinators, technical support staff, and many others.
The center is the grand master of all airspace and, ironically, is the least visible to the flying public. As your flight reaches its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet, you look outside and it feels like you’re all alone in a sea of blue. Appearances can be quite deceiving, however. Watch outside long enough and you can see other aircraft zip by, only 1,000 feet above or below you. Contrails can stretch for hundreds of miles in any direction. The sky can be very busy.
The enroute controller, in contrast to approach, works in a “strategic” or “big picture” method. The aircraft travel much faster at altitude, but since the airspace is so much broader, the traffic picture appears to move more slowly. Traffic separation is often maintained with small moves over longer distances, for example, instead of more drastic turns that are quite common in the Terminal environment.
Centers also get to handle a lot of extracurricular activity, including air refueling, large military aircraft movements, training areas, search and rescue, research flights, and so on. As you fly along, you could pass over a group of Air Force fighter jets refueling from a KC-135 Stratotanker. Beneath them could lie a stack of holding airliners, waiting to get into Atlanta. It all blends together with the horizon out your window, but it’s all clearly visible to the Center’s radar.
The Off Ramp to Town
After passing through a few ARTCCs, it’s time to descend. The center controller clears your aircraft for a lower altitude. They place you into one of four or more arrival streams for your destination. “Contact approach,” and the process begins to reverse. Arrival blends your stream with the others, gets everyone in line, and clears the planes for their final approaches. Nearing the end of your voyage, after a couple thousand miles and a few dozen skilled controllers, your airliner is a shining pearl in the sky. One after another, with two and a half miles of in-trail spacing between them, they contact the tower, where the last few controllers will guide them the final few miles.
“Cleared to land.” The main gear screeches on the concrete below, the engines roar again with reverse thrust to slow down your craft enough to exit the runway. As soon as the plane clears, another is touching down within seconds. The local controller constantly ensures that only one aircraft is coming or going at all times. Now you can see a swarm of airplanes outside the window. The delicate choreography between controllers in the tower and the pilots below keep everything moving swiftly. Before long, you see the jetway attach and your voyage has been completed safely. One voyage out of thousands that have occurred that day.
Welcome home.
Eddie Trujillo has been an FAA Air Traffic Controller for nearly a decade. He has been at Chicago TRACON since 2010, and prior to that spent five years at Memphis ARTCC. He is a loving husband, a father to three girls, and a proud #AvGeek. Follow Eddie on Twitter @trujilloea.
London City is to become the first UK airport to replace its air traffic control tower with a remotely operated digital system.
Instead of sitting in a tower overlooking the runway, controllers will be 120 miles away, watching live footage from high-definition cameras.
The new system, due to be completed in 2018, will be tested for a year before becoming fully operational in 2019.
It has already been tested in Australia, Sweden, Norway and Ireland.
The technology has been developed by Saab, the Swedish defence and security company, and will be introduced as part of a £350m development programme to upgrade London City Airport.
It will also include an extended terminal building, enabling it to serve two million more passengers a year by 2025.
The remote digital system will provide controllers with a 360-degree view of the airfield via 14 high-definition cameras and two cameras which are able to pan, tilt and zoom.
The cameras will send a live feed via fibre cables to a new operations room built at the Hampshire base of Nats, Britain's air traffic control provider.
As well as being able to see it, controllers will be able to hear the airport, as if they were in situ.
Unlike the old tower, the new system will allow controllers to zoom in for a better view and put radar data onto the screen to track aircraft.
BBC transport correspondent Richard Westcott says a critical new safety feature means the cameras will be able to pick out rogue drones near the airport, as well as light the runway at night.
Eurocontrol's Maastricht Upper Area Control Center manages traffic above 24,500 feet over Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Northwest Germany and a small part of Northern France.
While Eurocontrol's multinational Maastricht Upper Area Control (MUAC) Center aims to further improve its performance and productivity in air traffic management (ATM) in the short term and introduce free route airspace in 2018, some countries’ sovereignty concerns continue to raise barriers to overdue implementation of Single European Sky (SES) agreements.
Traffic has grown faster than expected this year and MUAC controllers anticipate a record number of flights, exceeding last year’s numbers by some three percent. MUAC manages traffic above 24,500 feet over Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Northwest Germany and a small part of Northern France, accounting for 17 percent of all European traffic and making it one of the busiest centers on the continent.
Airspace designers divided the area into cross-border sectors, split further into two horizontal layers. Authorities have begun to study introducing a third layer to generate more capacity. Plans that called for the study to start in December recently have stalled. “In some sector groups, the complexity is so high that creating more sectors or layers is not an option,” a spokeswoman said. Each sector has its own radio frequency.
Tuesday April 3, the crew of United Express Flight 5912, an Embraer 145 carrying 21 passengers, called controllers at Denver International Airport with an emergency, and the response has come under investigation. The crew initially called at about 8:30 a.m. with smoke in the cockpit. But controllers at the airport have reportedly become leery of false transmissions initiated by people on the ground. The controller apparently misheard the aircraft's flight number and initially dismissed the call's urgency. It was only after the aircraft landed and the controller was called again by the crew of the aircraft that he alerted rescue crews. By that time, five minutes had elapsed since the initial emergency call. Once on scene, firefighters extinguished a fire behind the instrument panel. The NTSB has turned over the investigation to the FAA.
AVweb has obtained audio excerpts from the pilot/controller exchange.
Next-Gen Air Traffic Control Vulnerable To Hackers Spoofing Planes Out Of Thin Air
A hacker attack that leads to planes dropping from the sky is the stuff of every cyberwar doomsday prophesy. But some security researchers imagine a less sensational, if equally troubling possibility: Hundreds or thousands of aircraft radioing their approach to an air traffic control tower, and no way to sort through which are real and which are ghost plane signals crafted by a malicious hacker.
At the Black Hat and Defcon security conference this week in Las Vegas, two security researchers plan to give separate talks on the same troubling issue: By 2020, a new system known as Automated Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast or ADS-B will be required as the primary mode of aircraft tracking and control for commercial aircraft in the U.S.–earlier in other countries such as Australia. And both researchers say that ADS-B lacks both the encryption necessary to keep those communications private and the authentication necessary to prevent spoofed communications from mixing with real ones, potentially allowing hackers to fabricate messages and even entire aircraft with radio tools that are cheaper and more accessible than ever before.
“Anyone can technically transmit these messages,” says Andrei Costin,..................
Three airliners were headed on a collision course at Reagan National Airport on Tuesday in the latest in a string of high profile incidents caused by air traffic control errors.
Tuesday’s incident involved three US Airways commuter jets, two of which had just taken off from the airport and one of which was inbound to land when the incident occurred.
According to a report by the Washington Post, the aircraft on approach and the first aircraft on departure were 1.4 miles apart and within 500 feet vertically when air traffic control realized the situation and took corrective action.
It would have taken the two aircraft, flying at a combined speed of 436 mph, 12 seconds to close the space between them had they maintained their intended flight paths.
After being directed to make an immediate turn to the right, the pilot of the inbound jet reportedly asked ATC, “We were cleared at the river there…what happened?”
“We really don’t have enough fuel here for this. We have to get on the ground pretty quick,” the pilot went on to say, after being told that ATC was “trying to figure this out.”
The mix-up was initially triggered by an incoming storm and a wind direction change, which caused Warrenton controllers to redirect several inbound aircraft approaching from the south on a new course that would allow them to approach the north side of the airport’s main runway.
A federal official told the Post that the tower decided to make the change, but didn’t communicate the information to approach control.
The collective 192 passengers and crewmembers on board all three aircraft were unharmed in the incident and proceeded to their intended destinations without further incident.
London City is to become the first UK airport to replace its air traffic control tower with a remotely operated digital system.
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.