The closest understanding I have to this is that pilots follow “sky highways,” but how do pilots know they’re still in their assigned highway? Doppler? GPS? Practice? Cloud magic?
PS please pardon me if the flair isn’t correct, I wasn’t sure what to file it under
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There’s lot of different methods and instruments pilots use. First off, they have very detailed compasses. They don’t just go North East, they go exactly 42.5 degrees. That is slightly North of North East for reference. There’s no roads so they can just go this same direction almost the whole flight.
They also can maintain a consistent speed. If they are going 500 miles per hour, and flying the same rate for hours, and are traveling at a specific direction, you can calculate where they will be before they get there. You can say that even though Plane 1 is currently in Buffalo, it will be over the Illinois-Indiana border at exactly 4:13 AM.
An air traffic controller will get this information from all the planes in an area of the country and run these calculations. If they see that any two planes are on pace to be in the same exact point at the same time they will tell one of them to change their speed or angle so they don’t hit each other.
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