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”?
In: Other
More or less. Every airport has a traffic controller whose job it is to coordinate different planes operating around it. A typical airport has “lanes” that planes join until cleared to land or that they follow after takeoff.
Away from an airport, the sky is just so big that there’s not *that* much coordination required. There are a matter of a few thousand flights in the air in the US at any given time – let’s say 5,000 for a nice round number (the FAA says that’s [close to peak activity](https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers/)). Dividing the area of the continental US by that number tells us that each plane has an area [about half the size of Rhode Island](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3%2C119%2C884.69+square+miles+%2F+5%2C000) to itself. So there’s not much risk of a collision, particularly when you keep in mind that they also have a mile or two of vertical room to play with (and once there’s only a few planes around, a pilot can reasonably keep track of them all).
Latest Answers