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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Aircraft have to file a flight plan that indicates the route they will travel on. Usually the flight plan is made based on things like how short the route is, what the weather looks like, and if they have to fly around any restricted areas (like you can’t fly over Area 51 in your Cessna). In the US, rules about what paperwork to use and where to file it are made by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
So in this respect I suppose it’s more like a railroad system where everything is pre-scheduled, although there are deviations, like when a flight crew is late to a plane or there is a technical issue. An airport is not going to make all the other flights wait five hours just because one plane needed to recharge its batteries or something.
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