I find it amazing that planes don’t crash into each other when taxiing in/out of gates. How do they do that? It’s not like the pilots have a backview mirror/window through which they can look behind the plane.
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The Tower observes the location of all planes on the tarmac and in the air surrounding the airport and give instructions accordingly.
Airports are designed to have space between the planes so they don’t crash, air traffic control has a person who is responsible for directing traffic on the ground so a plane doesn’t start to taxi to a gate before the plane that’s there already leaves, and there are people on the ground with hella dope rave sticks who are indicating to the tow vehicle and aircrew what to do (i.e., stop immediately if there’s a risk of collision).
Couple of things. Ground crews actually push the plane back from the terminal, so it isn’t the pilot looking over his shoulder. Though that’s kinda funny to visualize.
Also, at any decent sized airport they have a ground control system that pretty much works just like air traffic control. They tell them when they can push back, where to go, and when to go, till they get in line at the runway and get handed off to ATC.
Its absolute in no way amazing, its actually fairly simple.
First, pilots are highly trained. They’ve done this a lot of times. You probably never have, but to them this is normal. Taxiing has a lot of rules and procedues, much like driving a car on the road, you stay in your lane, follow traffic signs and stop lights and such
Second, they are being told where to go and when, there are people they are talking to on the radio that know when they are arriving, and what gate they need to go to for every plane. And plans are made to ensure they get there. But that said, there often aren’t that many planes taxiing around at the same time, its not much to de-conflcit.
Lastly, I mean, if theres an issue, you just stop, no seriously. you just stop make sure things are OK, then keep going
Planes dont reverse from gates under their own power. They are pushed back using pushbike tractors/tugs. Those low down weird looking truck things. The pushback is managed by groundcrew, and only on the authority of air traffic control.
there is a ground control tower that communicates with every plane on the radio.
the guy in the tower has a map of every plane that is at the airport, and they are responsible for moving the planes. That’s why you often get stuck waiting to take off – the tower is moving planes around, slowly and safely.
Planes do NOT MOVE until the tower instructs them to. If they do, the pilot can lose their license. They DO NOT MOVE. Period.
So that’s how it’s done – one or two people are responsible, they know where everyone is, and no one moves without being told to move.
Don’t think of pilots as individual actors – think of them as pieces on a chessboard, that move when the player picks them up and moves them. Then it wil lmake sense.
It’s like a really good game of Simon Says.
Simon is the ground traffic controller who can see almost everything. The player is blindfolded, but he gets a few extra helpers to guide him along.
There’s a ground control tower.
Planes do move on command. Because of that, the only way to collide is to not listen to the tower, which can’t happen because if you don’t listen to tower you are fired well before you collide.
When the plane does “push back” aka being pushed out of gate, there’s the pilot relaying to ground crew what the tower says, the ground crew is one person on a tractor, one comm guy, two wing walkers. If one of the four is not happy with what is going on they do a signal and tractor guy stops the plane, check again the surrounding, when if everyone signal good to go they move again.
There are ground controllers guiding planes both on the tarmac (the guys with the flashlight thing) and in control towers with radio communication to pilots.
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