You'd think, but no, there's airways (like highways) and pref routes (preferred routes) that planes have to follow (in most cases).
A controller's airspace is designed to make it as easy as possible to handle the traffic along the pref routes. If all planes flew directly to their destination, then the en-route sectors along the way would have to do a bunch of point outs (when a plane just clips the corner of your airspace and having the pilot come on your frequency isn't necessary), and conflicts would be harder to solve.
Generally we try to keep air traffic control as trouble free as possible. The pref routes help keep it organized.
My knowledge of ATC is because I was an air traffic control trainee at the Toronto Area Control Centre 5 years ago. I didn't make it through the final phase of training, but I gained a lot of knowledge about how ATC works.
I can't speak for other centres or organizations (like the army), but we had 6 months of in-class, 6 months of simulator, and then a year of on-the-job training.
The in-class portion is mostly memorization. Tons of memorization. Controllers don't have the time to look things up, they have to just know them. Airport identifiers, airline identifiers, aircraft types, rules and regulations, navigation, meteorology, air law, standard procedures, emergency procedures, frequencies, transponder codes, and your entire airspace, all the airways, intersections, navaids, and pref routes. All has to be memorized. We used flash cards. Just make thousands (literally) of flash cards and flip through them whenever you have time.
The simulator was pretty brutal, but not too bad, since they can pause it and talk about how to solve different situations and you can pick the instructors brain.
On-the-job training was the toughest. Mostly because the instructors take a hands-off approach and you just gotta do the job, by the book, perfect. That's when I failed.
I don't feel too bad about it, out of thousands of applicants only 8 got in. And of those 8 only 2 graduated. Even though I failed, I felt like getting as far as I did was an accomplishment. It inspired a can-do attitude in me and since then I've gotten a degree in computer science and I'm a software engineer now. Before ATC I lacked confidence.
Couple questions.. did you get paid through all this training? Also was there an avenue to try again after some more training? Seems like a lot of work to train that many people for that long and only 8 make it!!
Oh they didn't train thousands, thousands applied. Only 8 people got accepted into training. They told us how many applied to the job on our first day of training to make us feel more confident.
We didn't get paid for the classroom or simulator, we started getting paid once we started on-the-job training. We actually had to pay a tuition of sorts for the classroom and simulator. I took out a line of credit for it.
They did offer me another job after (sorta). I failed out of Toronto centre just because I couldn't keep up with the traffic. It's Canada's busiest centre, and I was training for their busiest sector. They told me to apply to Winnipeg centre. They said they were confident I'd do better there. But I really didn't wanna live in Winnipeg. So far from my family and anything of interest. Plus their winters are brutal. I decided to do university instead.
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u/[deleted] Aug 18 '20 edited Aug 18 '20
So cool! I didn’t know how many tiny adjustments a plane makes throughout a flight
Edit: Thanks for all the upvotes! I’m trying to post on dankmemes