How Air Traffic Control Works | Wendover Productions

0:00This video was made possible by Hover by your domain before it's gone for Temberson off by going to Hover.com slash Wendover. This is Heathrow Airport, Britain's busiest. Each day about 650 flights take off from one of its two runways. At the busiest times, this represents one aircraft every 45 seconds. Of those 650, about 20 flights daily head to Frankfurt. Between British shareways and Lufthansa, flights on this route depart more than hourly throughout the daytime. This makes Frankfurt one of Heathrow's most frequently served destinations. Despite the unremarkable nature of such a flight, the complexity of even this one-hour hop is enormous. It takes dozens of people spread out all across the continent to coordinate and navigate just one of these flights safely to his destination. This is everything that happens within the 90 minutes it takes for a plane to get from its gate at Heathrow to its gate in Frankfurt.ours before the flight is scheduled to take off, British

1:01shareways will have sent a flight plan to here. Euro Control's network manager operation center in Brussels. Now, Euro Control is an intergovernmental air traffic management organization. Well, Euro Control is an intergovernmental organization of 43 states, Euro Control and beyond, and we do air traffic management service traversal. What that means is that Euro Control deals with a variety of different aspects of the job of managing air traffic in Europe. One element of that is what's called network management. This function essentially involves, from this room, making sure that flights make their way through Europe as safely and smoothly as possible. That field is headed up by Sopo Prisignotti, Euro Control's director of network management. So here you see that's our operational room. The scope is to provide services to 43 air navigation service providers, to provide services to 500 airports, and to provide services to more than 1000 airlines over the network. One corner of this

2:06room is devoted to checking those flight plans that airlines send in. Now, what they need to check is that these plans are following the rules. You see, two aircraft, these sky does not look like this, but rather this. At least in most of Europe, there are thousands upon thousands of predefined airways each with their own rules on directionality and routes and more. So aircraft not only need to fly on these roads, but they also need to follow the rules of the roads. Looking at this map, you can see why, for example, you won't see many planes flying over this area in the east of England. There just aren't many airways there. Euro Control sends the flight plans through a program to check that they follow these rules, but if the computer rejects it, then it goes to these people in about 2% of cases who coordinate with the airline to fix it manually. From there, they'll distribute the flight plans to all the air traffic control centers that each aircraft is expected to fly over. That process happens before the flight has even taken off. Going back to that British Airways, he throw the Frankfurt flight. Once their plan is approved, the plane is fueled, loaded,

3:11and ready to go. The pilot will get approval from British Airways' flight dispatcher and he throws ground control to push back. Ground control is responsible for navigating all the vehicles and planes safely across the apron until when they reach the runway. The moment an aircraft gets to the runway, they are then the responsibility of tower control, which, assuming all as well, clears them for takeoff. As the plane reaches altitude, it will be passed off to the London Terminal Control Center, located here near Southampton, which navigates aircraft through the complex London area airspace until they reach 24,500 feet or flight level 245, which for this flight should be just about when it reaches the coast. From there, they'll be transferred to the London area control center, which is physically located in the same building, to navigate them across the channel. Once they reach about halfway across however, they leave the UK's airspace and enter Belgium's. With that, they are now the responsibility of the Maastricht Upper Area Control Center, also managed by Euro Control. We are European

4:12non-profit cross-border, military civil and navigation service provider, and our job is that we handle safely and in an efficient and performent way, all traffic above flight level 245, 24,500 feet. To reiterate, they handle traffic across this whole area above 24,500 feet or 7,500 meters. So we manage what more or less 1.9 million of movements per year, so between 5,500, 700 movements depending on the season and the day per day. It's one of the busiest and most complex airspaces in Europe, especially as it receives a significant amount of traffic climbing from or descending into four of Europe's five busiest airports. He throw, skiple, Frankfurt and Paris Charles de Gaulle. Every single one of those flights, as long as it's between flight level 245 and 660, is in contact with the people in this room. Now the Maastricht Control

5:15Center's airspace is divided into three sector groups, the Brussels, Hanover and Deco sector groups. Each sector group is staffed by their own set of controllers who only work on their group. A Brussels sector group controller would very rarely switch over to the Hanover group, for example. Many controllers spend their entire careers working at one control center within one sector group. This allows them to really learn the design of their airspace in depth. Each of these sector groups is then divided into sectors themselves. Now sectors can be divided both horizontally and vertically. For example, there's the Luxembourg sector between flight level 245 and 355 and also the Luxembourg high sector above flight level 355. At the very busiest times, each sector will have its own dedicated set of controllers. At less busy times though, they can and do combine the upper and lower sectors together so they're staffed by one set of controllers. At the least busy times, such as in the middle of night, they'll

6:16often combine in number of sectors. For example, the entirety of Belgian airspace is typically controlled by one set of controllers in the dead of night. In charge of each sector are two controllers working as a team. One is in charge of talking to pilots, the other is in charge of talking to their counterparts at other sectors according handovers. Now in practice, for that London to Frankfurt flight, before enters master's airspace in the Coaxie sector, they'll receive info on where and at which flight level it will arrive. They'll also get info from the flight plan on where it's supposed to exit their sector. An aircraft might also enter at one altitude and be planned to exit at another. The task is then to safely navigate the aircraft from the entry point to exit point and deliver it to the next sector at the desired altitude. Now, assuming no added obstruction such as weather or airspace closures, the main obstacles planes need to avoid at this altitude are other planes. There are rules about how close a plane can be to another in order to avoid any chance of mid-air collision and the controller's job is to make sure that these rules are not

7:18broken or, if they are, to get to the correct level of separation as soon as possible. An aircraft must be either vertically or horizontally separated from all others at any given time. What this means is that typically a commercial aircraft cruising at this altitude can be as little as 1,000 vertical feet or 300 vertical meters away from another. That's vertical separation. Alternatively, an aircraft can be horizontally separated. They have to be at least five nautical miles, six miles, or nine kilometers apart if they're within 1,000 feet vertically. Now, in order to achieve the goals of getting the aircraft to a sex point without breaking minimum separation, there are three factors that the controller can instruct the pilot to change, speed, altitude, and direction. That is essentially what a controller spends most of their time doing, determining where the aircraft needs to go, how to get it there, and communicating that to the pilot. Soon enough, after just a few minutes, as the aircraft reaches its exit point from the sector, it will be passed onto the controller of the next sector.

8:20In this case, it'll go into the NICI sector, then ONO sector, then it will move on airspace beyond with the master-dupper area control center manages. As the plane starts to descend, it will be passed onto controllers dealing with lower airspace, then approach in tower control to guide it into landing. All told, on just this hour-long flight, more than a dozen air traffic controllers will have dealt with this aircraft. But that's what happens when absolutely everything is going right, which is rarely the case. You see, back at your control's network manager room, the second thing they do with the flight plans they receive is to make sure that once an aircraft gets flying, there are actually enough air traffic controllers to manage it. So, air traffic control, they decide on their capacity. How many flights can safely be handed in one piece of airspace by one air traffic controller? That's their decision based on their staffing, based on their infrastructure, their tools, and that is communicated to us. So, there's a limited number of flights a single air traffic controller can handle, but there's

9:24also a limited number of air traffic controllers. It's no secret that Europe, along with much of the world, is suffering through an air traffic controller shortage right now. Simultaneously, along with much of the world, Europe has been experiencing a tremendous increase in its number of flights. This supplying and demand mismatch has consequences. In 2018, 60% of all in-route delays, as in while the aircraft is actually flying, were because of not having enough air traffic control capacity. Part of your control's job, therefore, is to utilize the limited resources in the most effective way possible. Often, they reduce overall delays by delaying flights. Sometimes it's just for a few minutes, sometimes it's for longer, but if you're flying in Europe and you hear that your flight is delayed for air traffic control reasons, that decision was probably made in this room. It's just like a ramp meter on a highway. They let a manageable number of flights fly at any given time when their our capacity constraints. Now, when a flight receives a delay by your control,

10:25the airline essentially has two choices, except the delay in a weighted out or fly a different route. Airlines have access to your control system to help them make this decision. For instance, here's the flights. It's a Thomas Cook flight from Manchester going to Antalya in Turkey and they have planned this blue route here. This is the route that Thomas Cook has decided is best for them. It's the least expensive considering fuel costs, overflight costs, and everything. Given that it flies through capacity-constrained areas, though, to fly this route, they would have to sit through a delay. Through our system now, they can look at to see, okay, where are routes that do not give them delay? Those are all the blue routes you can see here. And actually, then there is a gray route here, which is the shortest of the blue. So, system says, if you want to avoid your route, which has delay, you can take blue routes or the shortest blue, which is the gray, and it's up to you. The airline can then go and decide whether it's worth it to them to fly the alternate route or wait out the delay. Your control's network

11:27management role is really most applicable on the worst days for flying in Europe. Their job is to make the bad days as okay as possible. An example of a really bad day for flying was Thursday, May 9, 2019. The main issue was a large scale French air traffic controller strike, meaning there was little air traffic control capacity in French airspace, one of the busiest areas. If you look at the SMAP, that shows the magnitude of the impacts on the sectors that they color red means that there were delays in the order of 45 minutes or above per flight. On days such as this, many airlines will choose to fly around France as to be less delayed, but of course the ATC centers in the surrounding countries need to be able to cope with demand. Starting from three to four days before this event is confirmed, we would coordinate with Spain, North African countries, Algeria, Tunisia. We would coordinate with Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Caldruy. We would

12:32coordinate with Maastricht and UK to be able to get extra capacity for all those who have to go out. So one alternative route from UK to go down to south of Spain and continuation on that, what we call tango. Tenga Route takes planes way out west into oceanic airspace to take a wide curve around French airspace and is commonly flown when French airspace is restricted. It is, of course, not efficient. A flight from Alicante to London, for example, which normally takes just two hours, would take over three by using tango route, but overall it would typically arrive earlier than if they waited for approval to fly through French airspace. What made the 9th of May even worse is that drones were spotted at Frankfurt Airport, meaning all arrivals and departures were stopped. What we do, we immediately get in contact with all the airports around if you like. You know, this was the case in Frankfurt, we contacted Amsterdam, Munich, Paris, Brussels.

13:38Immediately to try to understand incoming flights or live traffic, where they could land. Euro-control will get information from the surrounding airports on how many diverted aircraft they can handle and passes this information on airlines so they can quickly book a diversion slot for their aircraft. All told, there were over 300,000 minutes of delays on May 9th, but initial calculations determined that there was the potential for over 1 million minutes of delays, which means that Euro-control likely succeeded in their task of improving the day. Euro-control's network manager room is expected to be quite busy in the coming months. Right now, in early June, they already know summer 2019 is going to be messy. It's the busiest period of the year for flights, and there's actually less air-traffic control capacity than there was in summer 2018 when they had 26 million minutes of delays. They fear this summer could be worse, but they made their action plan months ago and will be here non-stop through the coming months

14:39to make the summer travel season as smooth as it can be. Overall, this room, air traffic control centers, and the rest of the world's air traffic management infrastructure are crucial tools to make sure that routine, uneventful flights like London to Frankfurt stay uneventful. One thing that aviation loves is checklists. They make sure you complete crucial steps, and that's why when I launch something new, I have my own checklist of crucial steps. One of the first steps after coming up with a name is buying the domain name. That's because I know that domains go fast, and if you wait too long, someone else might take your perfect domain. I recently launched a podcast, for example, and immediately bought the domain extremitiespodcast.com through hover. I haven't even set up a website yet, but considering the low price, it was worth it to me to sit on the domain, and for now, I took about 30 seconds to set up the domain to redirect to the podcast download page. No matter what you're doing, whether it be a YouTube channel, a podcast, a business, or anything else, you should get your domain

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