When you fly into somewhere like San Diego or New York, you fly right over the city and are basically directly next to skyscrapers. But when you fly into somewhere like Austin or New Orleans, you’re flying over flatlands. How do pilots know clearance for certain areas, does ground control tell them how best to land or does that not matter?
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Our maps (VFR) have big blue numbers in each area that tells us the proper attitude we need to be to avoid hitting things. For example, a map would have 25 or 2500 in huge text in one section that shows the highest object in that big ole area is 1,500 feet or less (they round up).
In IFR, we have routes like a road that we travel along. These routes use radio beacons (VOR) to provide established “lanes” or GPS. For example: a VOR airway may be a radial of 315 off Atlanta VOR, which means we intercept the VOR direction of 315 degrees based on that particular VOR. Such a route would be labeled V315 off Atlanta VOR.
These routes, like roads, require aircraft separation so we are issued an altitude to fly on by ATC (Center, departure control, approach control, whomever owns that airspace).
ATC can stack multiple aircraft on the same route and sequence us for landing in an orderly manner.
If there is a loss of communication, we are expected to maintain our issued flight clearance or whatever we filed for before takeoff. This means we stay at the last assigned altitude until we reach our destination initial approach fix.
Lost comms doesn’t happen very often but there is a procedure in place. It happened to me once with Boston Center during a handoff (moving from one ATC controller to another one). Boston Center was pissssssed at us once we landed but we did the paperwork n showed it was a malfunction in the avionics closet.
No matter what, it is the pilots responsibility to maintain proper clearance from not flying into stuff.
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