Talk:Air traffic control

What follows my signature here is obsolete. Section 1/2: not even sure how that got here. Section 2/2: not true any longer. A real ATC page was needed. See [1].

Mickybadia (talk) 06:23, 20 March 2015 (EDT)

Stuff marked obsolete on 20/03/2015

Anyone deciding to make changes to this model should spend some time using a good ATC simulator like the one at http://atc-sim.com (see [2] for more pointers).

The text on the radar screens on both of the current ATC versions is so small as to be useless in identifying planes, altitudes, and to a lesser extent direction. The present layout has a round radar screen but really a rectangle or a square would be a more efficient use of the space available.

The camera view of the planes that you are controlling is a nice touch but not really necessary for a proper ATC experience and even a distraction in ATC Ver 2. In real life situations the Air Traffic Controllers do not have magic cameras that can zoom in on any plane within 20 miles of the airport (perhaps a pair of good binoculars that they can look out of the tower window with (assuming that they are in the tower)). My view would be to keep this in mind and while keeping this camera view in a small window spend more time on programming a more usable radar screen.

A list of the active pilots (within the radar range) including altitude speed and heading on one side would be nice. It would be extremely nice if you could click on a pilot in that list and cause some secondary actions such as,

1. Automatically entering the ID of the plane as a prefix to the next text message. (When giving instructions we always identify the plane at the beginning of an instruction and some people have long user names, which take a lot of time to manually type in.)

2. Camera view zooms to that plane.

Having to press the “Chat” button to send a message is a nuisance. This should be modified to just hitting “ENTER”.

It is also a pain that you must activate the chat window before your chat text is accepted. Example, if you click on the arrows to change the aircraft view you must click again in the chat area before any text you type is accepted as a chat message.

Shortcuts would also be great like being able to Hit “F” followed by 1 or “F” followed by 2 and having the text automatically entered into a chat message such as FLIGHT LEVEL 1 or FLIGHT LEVEL 2 or “H280” for “HEADING 280”. Following through “T” could be “CLEARED FOR TAKE-OFF” and “L” could become “CLEARED FOR LANDING” etc.

Navaids identified on the radar screens would be nice to be able to give a point of reference to the pilots you are communicating with.

Some of your ideas are pretty interesting, however you may want to put them these to a more appropriate place, possibly by starting a new page about proposals related to the ATC client, e.g. something like Proposals:ATC Client related.

Even better would be to send them directly to the "aircraft" author! I already did that for you this time, but next time do it yourself ;)

Btw, please sign your messages on the wiki with four tildes (~)

Gijs 08:15, 8 July 2009 (EDT)

merging with "Communications"

As most content of this page is already covered by "Communications" and "Communications" is the more abstract one (it also contains UNICOM), I think it should be merged into "Communications" and be further improved there.