With so many airplanes flying around, how airports around the world able to track so many airplanes and prevent them from colliding with each other? Is it basically, “alright, so this plane is coming from this route, do not put any plane on this route”?
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Firstly there are rules which help airplanes seperating. For long distance flights airplanes have to keep an even or odd flight level depending on if they are going east or west. For airports there are standard arival and departure routes in addition to a standard landing or takeoff flight pattern. So in a perfect world airplanes following these rules should never come near each other. Airplanes also have collision detection systems to detect if they are on collision course, in addition to two pilots looking out ahead for other airplanes.
Air traffic control centers are just there to make sure the traffic flows smoother and tell the pilots to take action long before they have to. The system they use is largely based on timeslots on routes. So for example a route might allow one airplane ever ten minutes so the airliners will apply for one of these timeslots and make sure their airplane passes through the first checkpoint at the time they say. This is usually decided hours before. However it is possible for the air traffic controllers to move around a bit on the timeslots if airplanes does not make their scheduled checkpoints or if the weather changes. If an airplane is too early they can be told to go into a holding pattern, basically fly around in a circle, until their slot is open. Or if there is an open slot before their scheduled one they are routed directly through, possibly even allowed to take a shortcut from the standard routes.
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