: How does a pilot know where the airport is when he is flying to a particular destination for the first time in his life?
In: Other
Pilots don’t just get into a plane and fly to a city on a whim, like you might decide to take a prettier street at the last minute on the way to the grocery store. They have to declare a flight path a head of time that basically says the exact altitude and direction the plane will fly in from A to B, so it’s sort of getting Google Maps to spit out directions, you might not know exactly where you’re going but you just follow the directions and you’ll get there.
Older planes even had a dedicated navigator who just looked at maps all flight and spat out directions for the pilots who were controlling the aircraft.
Airport runways are also named after the direction they face on a 360 degree circle, so runway 18 runs along the line 180 degrees from North. So even if they don’t know the airport, when the tower tells them “you are cleared to land on runway 22” they know to approach the airport at 220 degrees from North.
Anywho, most of this is computer controlled now with the pilot just monitoring the performance of the autopilot so yeah.
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