Air Traffic Control Simulator
zlsa.github.io
zlsa.github.io
* All the planes enter at 90 degree angles. I assume this is intentional, but it would be nice to have semi-random entry angles.
* There are a fixed number of planes in the simulation. It would be more challenging and fun if more planes would arrive while I'm taking care of the others.
* The words are small and hard to read.
All in all I think this is a really cool simulation. I can see myself wasting many more hours on it. Thanks!
http://www.bostonvirtualatc.com/ and others allow you to work as a controller for a virtual airspace populated by human "pilots."
For someone like me who is has never flown a plane, it added kind of an RPG aspect to the simulation.
It's the counter-intuitive out-of-the-box thinking that I come to HN for!
Sorry.
- Callsigns are long. In, let's call it bsdgames ATC, you have to type only one letter to indicate an aircraft. When Z is reached, you've long cleared A so the letter can be reused. This is more realistic though, I guess.
- It is not clear to me what an aircraft wants. Do all the flying ones want to land and all the landed ones to fly? Because in bsdgames ATC they each have a destination.
- The locations on the map (where you can fix an aircraft on, the triangles) are small and you have to properly look to make sure you typed it correctly. There is no highlighting like for planes.
- Runways are even harder to read. Here too there is no highlighting like for planes.
- You cannot send, as bsdgames ATC calls it, delayed commands (e.g. "N926JW fix QUITE then turn 0").
- You can not set an aircraft in "ignore mode", or otherwise mark it as "I have finished giving it directions".
- There is no command autocompletion. In bsdgames ATC you type "atdab0" to indicate "plane A, Turn to direction D (90 degrees) At Beacon 0." Or as the game displays it while you type the letters: "a: turn to 90 at beacon #0". After typing every letter, the game will display the next word to indicate it understood. (E.g. typing "at" it will display "a: turn to" and "atda" displays "a: turn to 90 at".)
There are a few things I really like though:
- The score system makes it not immediately 'game over' when you make a single simple mistake.
- It not only looks more modern, but because it's graphical and not ASCII there is a lot more space on the map to maneuver (at least it looks like that, maybe there are simply more planes). It also gives way more space for fix locations (triangles).
- Either this is common for ATC systems, or it looks like the good old bsdgames ATC. I like that it is a modern version which, with rather minor improvements, is better than the original.
- I wanted to be a realistic as possible, hence the long callsigns. However, all you have to type is the shortest unique callsign and that aircraft will be selected.
- If the aircraft has a red strip, it wants to land; if it's blue, it wants to takeoff and depart the area.
- The fix names are now bigger.
- The runway names are bigger. I'll make them more obvious, too.
- You cannot send delayed commands, just like real life.
- You can type "baw1234 tu 90 d 3 sp 2"; like callsigns, you only have to type the unique first few characters of the commands.
- "cannot send delayed commands, just like real life". It's not standard to tell pilots to fly a certain path, e.g. to a point and then head south? (I'm not sure, that's why I ask.)
- "shortest unique callsign" Yeah well, it might help to always make the first two or three characters unique, then you can be certain it always works without having to check the list. Realism is kept that way.
- "you only have to type the unique first few characters of the commands" Yes, but it doesn't autocomplete while typing. Though I guess learning those abbreviations might be part of the game.
In any case, thanks for making this. I've already mentioned some good points so I won't repeat myself :)
Unfortunately these two are fundamentally at odds. In real life the call signs are based on carrier (or tail number if no call sign is assigned). In the current iteration, there are two airlines, United (all of the UAL flights) and British Airways (all of the BWA flights), plus the Cessna "airline" that mimics general aviation craft by prefixing the call sign with "N".
If it was expanded it use actual flight data (if its legal) it would be something I could see myself losing a lot of time to it.
It'd be great to have the option to turn on/off radio chatter, the sort you hear when listening to real ATC transmissions. Would definitely make the experience feel a bit more immersive.
The real world is more of a team approach and most game sims have a pretty distorted view of reality. The guy who's doing ground taxi control at a tower doesn't usually moonlight at simultaneously running approach control while also simultaneously running departure control and enroute. A dude running approach 200 miles away usually doesn't get to play tower 200 miles away to tell a plane when they get to take off.
In my experience with aviation and ATC games, I haven't found one yet where the game designer was a pilot or ATC or listened on a scanner to pilots and ATC during the design phase.
I've also never seen a sim that handles dynamics for anything but planes. Real ATC is all about handling very local weather, and NOTAMS, and hot/cold MOAs (military training areas, if cold you just fly thru, if hot you get out of the way or get shot down). And of course it changes in real time not just once at game start. Also you trade / share space with other ATCs, so that dynamic would be interesting. And your shift doesn't end when all the planes land, you'll always both start and end a shift with planes in the air.
I don't expect much from the arcade games but there have been some sims out there that at least graphically have tried to look realistic and have at least sorta realistic procedures and limitations.
There are two things I'd like to see:
- More than two speed options. A slider, if possible?
- Some sort of simple scripting. I'd like to be able to dial in, "Navigate to WAYPOINT, then when you reach that, navigate to OTHER WAYPOINT, then descend to 5000 feet, then land on runway XX."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API [2]: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/... [3]: http://api.ai [4]: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/12/05/enhancing-ux-with...
http://www.justflight.com/product/tower-2011-single-player-e...
Pilots are really good at pretending to be ATC because of training to handle CTAF MULTICOM UNICOM all of which is basically the same idea despite some paperwork differences. I guess CTAF is what it is, and the COMs are individual technical implementations. Its been a long time since student pilot days and I remember UNICOM had flight service stations and I don't think MULTICOM allows FSS chatter about fuel prices and car rentals or whatever on freq.
I live nearby and did student pilot training at an airport that doesn't have ATC staffing over 3rd shift. There was only perhaps one landing per hour overnight, so they don't staff the tower. Pilots just kinda broadcast off into space, listen to each other, and talk to each other.
I guess you'd describe it as a quiet party line rather than the formal meeting of staffed ATC communications.
Contrary to popular belief pilots listen constantly to each other and will get sorta-complaints from the tower if they haven't been paying attention to other pilots... Cessna 1234 do you have Cessna 6789 traffic in sight to your SW? And if you haven't been paying attention to the conversation between ATC and 6789 such that you don't know 6789 exists or is to your SW, then ATC is going to be kinda sorta pissed. This is why you can't replace ATC with a cellphone, at least not practically.
Another popular, weird, belief is ATC is like radio control and shutting down radio control makes all the planes fall out of the sky. Without the "meeting coordinator / committee chairperson" effect of the ATC, everything will happen in agonizing slow motion with massive distraction, but it'll all happen perfectly well. The reason ATC exists is it saves the pilots time, lets them focus on flying the plane a little more than focusing on commo with every other plane in the area. Its the cognitive difference between a hub-spoke topology and a full mesh. At 2am when there's only 0, 1, or 2 planes up in the airspace over the field, there's not much difference.
ATC does occasionally fail and there are procedures for load sharing.
One interesting EE problem is good luck talking over a 500 watt ATC tower at the field, from a couple miles away and 1 watt handheld. Just saying. Sure you can piss a lot of people off, but complete and utter long term takeover is going to be rather non-trivial. And there are a huge number of planes and sites with DF gear for tracking the old fashioned emergency beacons, so of all the things to jam, aircraft freqs are probably the one freq band likeliest to result in your demise ... You'll live a lot longer jamming the FM radio band or CB or the cops. Maybe not long, but longer.
Speaking out of experience, yes. 1kW sorta-portable system on a hill in a car, no problems even after half an hour of running a pirate station.
In all it's simplicity this is really great.
Voices would be great. Emergencies (minimal fuel, medical, etc) and weather would also be great!
A printable list of commands would be nice.
Thanks for the commands :)
http://www.northkoreatech.org/2014/08/01/whos-using-north-ko...
In this instance though, when someone is showing the community their work, I feel it's a bit unfair to expect everyone who comments to have detailed and constructive feedback. Some people just want to say "awesome!" and I suspect the people submitting their work also want to hear that. Alas, it's a shortcoming. Perhaps up votes are the way to say "awesome".