In a highway, any car can enter and is flexible to switch lanes and the coordination between cars is mostly a responsibility of the drivers. In the railway everything is pre-routed and no surprises are technically possible — dispatchers and planners have more control than the train driver and there is no room for flexibility — you just stay in your rails. What is air like? Can I build my own plane and just join the air traffic without telling anyone?
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Commercial airlines usually follow “airways” that can be thought of as highways in a sense. These are used to manage air traffic controll of so many aircraft in the sky at once. And as another person pointed out they usually stack your assigned altitude based on the direction you are flying. There are “exit ramps” from the airways where an aircraft transitions from in route to terminal areas and then to specific runways. If you live near a busy airport you can usually see these patterns as you see the jets maneuver in for landing. When I was in aerospace years ago there was discussion about moving towards “freeflight” which is where the jet flies a more direct flight using GPS positioning and sophisticated TCAS systems (collision avoidance). I don’t know if that has materialized. It required a lot of coordination and technical development and I don’t know if it ever materialized.
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