100 Years ATC 100 Area Control Centres?

100 AREA CONTROL CENTRES?

zby Antonio LANDI, Air TRAFFIC CONTROLLER, Maastricht UAC

Some aviation professions are very visible for the travelling public. Security officers, check-in staff, pilots and flight attendants are probably the most recognizable for passengers, as they are at the forefront of the industry. There is a second layer that most people know about, but rarely get in contact with like mechanics, cleaners, luggage handlers, marshallers and the likes. Air traffic controllers working in a tower are probably also in this category. Once they get past calling the apron marshaller a controller, most people associate the job with the people working in the most identifiable building at the airport: the tower. This even extends to journalists: when there is an accident, how often do they mention that the aircraft lost contact with the ‘tower’, when it was clearly nowhere near an airport?

Further down the familiarity ladder are probably approach and flow controllers. The former are known from movies, as the people who, when an aircraft is in trouble, ‘talk them down to a safe landing’. And flow control is known, of course, from the pesky cabin announcements explaining why the aircraft has still not left the gate.

But that is probably as far as the knowledge of the general public goes. Few, if any, realise the vast network of Area Control Centres and the controllers that work in them. Area controllers spend a good portion of their non-professional life explaining that ‘no, we do not have batons to guide aircraft to the gates’, ‘no, we do not sit in the tower’, and, for a good portion of them, ‘no, we are actually nowhere near an airport’. Despite the explanations, it leaves most people bewildered as to why there would be people talking to aircraft that are just flying straight ahead. That bewilderment only increases when having to explain that two aircraft at the same height need more than 9 kilometres between them…

While air traffic control celebrates its centenary this year, not all functions were introduced at the same time. Initial focus was on the airport tower, even if they provided some en-route navigation and information services. Approach control came next, with controllers using direction finding to guide aircraft towards the airport in low visibility conditions. The last one to develop into a dedicated function was area control, at least to prevent collisions. The service developed from goniometry stations that provided navigational assistance to overflying aircraft, replacing visual reference points and beacons. Over time, these stations began passing traffic information on other aircraft and eventually, began providing separation between aircraft passing through their area of responsibility.

When discussing different projects for this celebratory edition of The Controller, we considered doing a “100 Area Control Centres” feature, similar to the 100 Towers page-spread. We quickly realised however that this was not going to be as iconic or captivating: other than some antenna’s and maybe a logo, the outside of most area control centres looks about as interesting as the average office building or shopping mall. And even though most of the editorial team that put this issue together actually works in an ACC, we all realised that it would probably be pretty boring to look at rows and rows of people staring at screens. y