Cleared to Land

Portmead aerodrome, 0212 hrs, 1963. One runway, and the weather is closing in.

Overcast at 180 metres. Visibility 2200 in rain. Wind 260 at 14. Runway 27 is the active and it is wet. You are the only controller on the night watch, in a glass cab twenty-eight metres above the threshold, and you never touch an aircraft.

You talk to it. And what it flies is what it thinks it heard.

What you actually do

Aircraft call you on the radio, aloud, each in its own voice. A paper flight-progress strip drops into the bay for every one of them, and the order of the strips is the order of the runway.

• Listen. Every spoken line is also printed on the strip, so nothing is lost if you miss it.
• Press a strip to select that aircraft. It lifts and opens to the printed record of everything it has said and everything you have told it.
• Press a clearance on the panel, or a number key. Cleared to land. Hold. Number two, follow the traffic. Go around. Vacate left.
• Read the readback. The aircraft repeats what it heard. A tired ferry pilot at two in the morning can hear "continue approach" as "cleared to land". A wrong readback is printed in red — say it again and it is corrected, and you are credited for catching it.
• Drag a strip up or down to resequence the runway.

The radar repeater paints a blip only as the trace sweeps past it, and then the blip fades. The windows show you rain. Between sweeps you are remembering, not reading.

What it costs

Nothing fails you at once. Mistakes compound.

An aircraft you forget is still out there, still in the hold, still burning fuel. It will ask again. Then it will tell you how much it has left. Then it will declare an emergency, and from that call you have about two minutes to give it the runway. Two aircraft sequenced too tightly force a go-around, and that one rejoins the back of a queue that grew while you were busy.

The shift ends when the last movement is down and the runway is cold. Then the shift report tells you what the watch cost: movements landed, go-arounds flown, emergencies declared, readback errors caught, and anyone who did not come home.

Who is out there

Callsign	Aircraft
Cargo	Douglas DC-3	Unhurried. Has done this a thousand times.
Midland	Vickers Viscount	Professional, warm, unbothered.
Golf	Cessna 172	Behind the aeroplane, over-reads, apologises.
Whisky	Avro Anson	Flat and tired, and terser as the fuel goes.
Rampart	Gloster Meteor	Fast, formal, minimum words.

Five people, five voices, one frequency.

Controls

Mouse and keyboard. Click a strip to select it, click a clearance on the panel or press 1–8, drag a strip (or use the arrow keys) to change the landing order, Esc to suspend the watch.

Worth seeing

The cold open over the wet runway before the first call. The moment three strips are red at once and you have to decide which one gets the runway. The shift report, typed on a movement return form, with a line for everyone who is not accounted for.

Play with sound on. The voices are the game.