- I am 35,000 feet above the North Atlantic,
somewhere just south of the tip of Greenland.
And there's no radar coverage up here,
there's no real-time view for an air traffic controller to know
where all the hundreds of planes sharing this airspace currently are.
So, how do we keep safe?
How do we avoid getting a bit too close to any of them?
The answer is down at my destination.
GPS: "Continue for 205 miles."
This is the Nav Canada Area Control Centre in Gander, Newfoundland.
And if you're over the North Atlantic,
these are some of the folks keeping you safe.
- The North Atlantic tracks are the airways
that we develop each day for our eastbound aircraft
who fly across from us over to the UK area.
The westbound tracks are produced
by our counterpart over in Scotland via Prestwick Centre.
The way the North Atlantic works, there's basically two main airflows.
During the night time, our night time here,
most of the aircraft leave North America and fly across to the UK.
And during the daytime, most of those same aircraft return.
It's a 24 hour operation obviously.
We start with our day-shift, comes in early in the morning.
We'll ask all these aircraft to send in their preferred routes for that night.
So I'll take that into consideration.
I'll also look at weather models.
Eastbound aircraft, all the aircraft want to get into the main jet stream
to pick up that tailwind so they can save money and fuel and time.
From all that, we'll develop a set of tracks based on that flow,
and once the tracks are published in the morning, airlines then have
anywhere from 8 to 10, 12 hours
to decide on what track they want to follow that night.
- The tracks can look curved and inefficient on the flat map projections we're used to
but you've got to remember, they're great circle routes.
They're the shortest, and cheapest way around the globe of the earth.
And also, the tracks are three dimensional.
Planes can be separated because they're on a different track,
or because they're on different positions on the same track,
or by altitude.
- It's a requirement for an aircraft to give us a position report
every 10 degrees of longitude.
And we take that information, and we apply it to the aircraft's route,
and we update our system,
and we can kinda predict where he's gonna be too.
When there's no radar coverage, there's two main forms of communicating
with the aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean.
We can go through our radio operators, our flight service operators,
and contact them through HF.
The easiest way for us, I guess,
is like a form of text message, you could call it.
I can just click on a button,
and I can tell exactly where that aircraft is at that point in time.
It's very precise, even without radar.
As a normal standard for our tracks,
side-by-side, which is our lateral separation,
we're running 60 nautical miles apart.
As time progresses, airlines get better equipped,
we'll probably have all our tracks at 30 miles apart from each other.
Longitudinal, which is one aircraft behind the other,
we're running 10 minutes.
We can reduce that down to a five minute standard if airliners are equipped.
And vertical, we're using 1,000 feet.
Some nights, you can just sit out on your patio
on a nice clear night, and you can see numerous aircraft,
and they look like they're all on top of each other, but basically,
they're all at least 1,000 feet apart, if not more.
They just have to be separated in one dimension basically.
As soon as an aircraft gets too tight to another aircraft, we interject and say,
okay, we need to slow you down, or speed you up,
traffic permitting obviously, right?
If a plane has an emergency, they have contingency procedures.
They have their TCAS.
TCAS is their Traffic Collision Avoidance System.
For instance, if you had two aircraft
and an aircraft did something it wasn't supposed to do,
climbed up into another aircraft,
that plane has a TCAS system that says, okay you have incoming traffic,
you have to climb, or descend, or whatever the resolution is, right?
So as soon as we're made aware of an emergency situation,
we look at separation, we try to move what aircraft we can,
and we provide a conflict free clearance for that aircraft,
safety being the number one thing here.
- Thank you very much to everyone at Nav Canada,
and at the Gander Area Control Centre.
You can find out more about them and the tracks at the links in the description.