The system that enables thousands of planes to fly hundreds of routes every day across the country. In 1920, the Croydon Airport near London was the fist airport to use air traffic control (ATC). In the U.S., the Post Office developed the first air mail radio station (AMRS) in 1922, but the first airport tower was in Cleveland in 1930. In 1958, the FAA was assigned responsibility for air traffic. See
ADS-B.
TRACONs and Sectors
A TRACON (terminal radar approach control) is an airspace managed by an air traffic controller team. It handles departures, arrivals and flights passing over a 50-mile radius of the airport. TRACONs are divided into sectors, each having a number of air traffic controllers.
As planes approach, the controllers turn them over to the airport for landing, and when they take off, the tower hands them off to the controllers.
The Floppy Disk Controversy
The fact that ATC computer systems are very old and still use floppy disks has many worried about the safety of flying. However, it is not the floppy disk that people need worry about, it is the stressful nature of the job. Because floppies gave way to CD-ROMs in the 1990s, it is obvious that the ATC computer systems are in dire need of modernization. However, the floppy disk is an offline medium and implies a much more manual operation, which at least makes the system a little bit less vulnerable to hacking. See
floppy disk.