Tower: Airport Traffic Control

Tower puts you in the tower at a real airport. Aircraft arrive from every side; you draw each one a route down to the ground and keep them apart on the way.

Drag a line from an aircraft and finish it inside a lit approach funnel. Helicopters take the pad instead. Arrive off the centreline and the aircraft goes around by itself and tries again.

Real fields, each bigger than the last

Every shift moves to another airport, drawn from its real layout. Pula has one strip and farmland around it. Zagreb is the same shape with more traffic. Paris gives you two parallel runways, and that is the first shift where which strip an arrival takes is a decision rather than a formality.

Arrivals are paced per runway, so more concrete means more aircraft, never an easier shift.

What makes it hard

• Wake turbulence. An airliner needs far more room around it than a biplane does. The circle drawn around each aircraft is its own requirement, and the larger of any pair sets the gap you must keep. Two aircraft established on different approaches are exempt — which is what makes a second runway worth having.
• Fuel. Everything in the air is burning it. The strip under each tag turns amber, then red. Run one dry and it diverts, and that is a strike. This is what forces you to choose who lands first.
• One aircraft on a runway at a time. An airliner is slow to clear the strip, so the one you let in early is the one blocking everybody behind it.
• Five kinds of aircraft. The fighter turns on a coin and arrives fast. The airliner needs half the county to come round. The biplane is slow enough to be in everyone’s way.

Controls

Drag from an aircraft to draw its route. Works with a mouse and with a finger. Press P to pause, and the FULL button fills the screen.

Three aircraft lost out of the airspace ends the shift. One collision ends it immediately.