7 ms·
Air Traffic Control Simulator
- tantalor 12y agoAfter going through the tutorial and landing a few planes, my first impression is the interface is extremely user hostile... I hope real ATC is better.
- bbarn 12y agoWhat's your feeling on vi/vim :)?
- runewell 12y agoemacs :)
- lisper 12y agoReal ATC is done verbally over radio. You'd need pretty good voice recognition (and probably some non-trivial AI) to simulate it.
- superuser2 12y agoFor the very limited vocabulary used in vectoring aircraft, the voice recognition part might not be horribly difficult (since it knows what it's expecting.)
- s-macke 12y agoSince I played "Kennedy Approach" on the C64 I dream of such a voice recognition ATC simulator. I have planned to program my own with such a limited vocabulary since more than 10 years. Well, in my next live then.
- jeffbr13 12y agoYou can outsource the voice recognition. Windows[1] and Mac OS[2] both seem to include speeech recognition APIs these days, and of course, what with it being 2014, there are online APIs[3] and forthcoming browser support[4]. All of them appear to support limited command grammars, which is perfect for this sort of simulation. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API [2]: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/Classes/NSSpeechRecognizer_Class/index.html https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/... [3]: http://api.ai http://api.ai [4]: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/12/05/enhancing-ux-with-the-web-speech-api/ http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/12/05/enhancing-ux-with...
- radnor 12y agoCheck out Tower 2011 - it supports voice commands. http://www.justflight.com/product/tower-2011-single-player-edition http://www.justflight.com/product/tower-2011-single-player-e...
- s-macke 12y agoThanks, will probably buy it.
- jjwiseman 12y agoThe general speech recognition engines from Nuance, Google, etc. might have difficulty with the specialized language. There are corpora available of transcribed radio communications with ATC, e.g. https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC94S14A https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC94S14A and http://cvsp.cs.ntua.gr/projects/pub/HIWIRE/WebHome/HIWIRE_db_description_paper.pdf http://cvsp.cs.ntua.gr/projects/pub/HIWIRE/WebHome/HIWIRE_db... You could use the corpora to train an acoustic model and language model for the Sphinx or Pocketsphinx open source speech recognizers.
- jjwiseman 12y agoThe reason I was looking into doing such a thing is that the NASA Airspace Operations Challenge[1] (now canceled) included as part of the competition the ability for drones to take verbal commands from ATC in case the communications links with their controllers were lost. The U.S. military has also been interested in giving drones this capability. 1. http://www.uasaoc.org/ http://www.uasaoc.org/
- tantalor 12y agoSounds like a nasty security problem.
- jkaljundi 12y agoInterestingly real ATC radio comms has a nasty security problem as well: no authentication. As a broadcast medium, anyone can hop on the frequency and pretend to be ATC or a plane. No way to know who is the real one. You can take out your handheld radio right now and pretend to be JFK Tower or SF Approach.
- VLM 12y ago"pretend to be ATC" Pilots are really good at pretending to be ATC because of training to handle CTAF MULTICOM UNICOM all of which is basically the same idea despite some paperwork differences. I guess CTAF is what it is, and the COMs are individual technical implementations. Its been a long time since student pilot days and I remember UNICOM had flight service stations and I don't think MULTICOM allows FSS chatter about fuel prices and car rentals or whatever on freq. I live nearby and did student pilot training at an airport that doesn't have ATC staffing over 3rd shift. There was only perhaps one landing per hour overnight, so they don't staff the tower. Pilots just kinda broadcast off into space, listen to each other, and talk to each other. I guess you'd describe it as a quiet party line rather than the formal meeting of staffed ATC communications. Contrary to popular belief pilots listen constantly to each other and will get sorta-complaints from the tower if they haven't been paying attention to other pilots... Cessna 1234 do you have Cessna 6789 traffic in sight to your SW? And if you haven't been paying attention to the conversation between ATC and 6789 such that you don't know 6789 exists or is to your SW, then ATC is going to be kinda sorta pissed. This is why you can't replace ATC with a cellphone, at least not practically. Another popular, weird, belief is ATC is like radio control and shutting down radio control makes all the planes fall out of the sky. Without the "meeting coordinator / committee chairperson" effect of the ATC, everything will happen in agonizing slow motion with massive distraction, but it'll all happen perfectly well. The reason ATC exists is it saves the pilots time, lets them focus on flying the plane a little more than focusing on commo with every other plane in the area. Its the cognitive difference between a hub-spoke topology and a full mesh. At 2am when there's only 0, 1, or 2 planes up in the airspace over the field, there's not much difference. ATC does occasionally fail and there are procedures for load sharing. One interesting EE problem is good luck talking over a 500 watt ATC tower at the field, from a couple miles away and 1 watt handheld. Just saying. Sure you can piss a lot of people off, but complete and utter long term takeover is going to be rather non-trivial. And there are a huge number of planes and sites with DF gear for tracking the old fashioned emergency beacons, so of all the things to jam, aircraft freqs are probably the one freq band likeliest to result in your demise ... You'll live a lot longer jamming the FM radio band or CB or the cops. Maybe not long, but longer.
- zacharycohn 12y agoI think it's a pretty hostile job in general.
- spacefight 12y agoIt sure can be. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_collision http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_collisi... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaly_Kaloyev http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaly_Kaloyev
- jpalomaki 12y agoSome things I noticed.. There's no need for mouse, just keep on writing commands. It is also possible to use shortcuts and enter multiple commands at once. For example "ba577 c 5 t 270 takeoff". In all it's simplicity this is really great.
- jmtucu 12y agoI like it
- lisper 12y agoCommand entry seems broken in Safari. But no JS errors.
- eddieroger 12y agoSame here. Safari 8.0.2 on Yosemite 10.10.2. It worked in Firefox though, but unfortunately didn't make me any good at the game. I couldn't get ILS. Maybe I didn't understand the landing part.
- fennecfoxen 12y agoIt looks like it works best when you point the plane in the right direction at 5000 feet, then have them fix on the named point in front of the runway in question, and tell them to land. Waiting until they're on the runway-skewers is too late.
- breckenedge 12y agoOK I know it's a simulation, but as a pilot, this really helps understand what ATC is going through. If I was a flight instructor, I'd recommend my students spend some time with this.
- bulte-rs 12y agoOne of my flight instructors actually put me through a few hours of tracon ;)
- javindo 12y agoThis is really good fun except it's incredibly difficult to read the navigation beacon names, even with zoom it is just very pixilated.
- Moral_ 12y agoNeeds better error correction when it comes to landing I haven't been able to land one yet I get it close to the lines but no cigar. I've resorted to just trying to get them to collide.
- zrail 12y agoYou have to tell them where to land with the "land" command.
- danwakefield 12y agoIts fun, The two speeds are at the extremes though, Maybe a third halfway between them. Runway names are impossible to see while landing a plane and it's not obvious that takeoff always happen on *R runways. If it was expanded it use actual flight data (if its legal) it would be something I could see myself losing a lot of time to it.
- asdfaoeu 12y agoI seemed to be able to takeoff fine off both. Also the runway names are just their heading.
- imownbey 12y agoWoah this is super fun and nothing was wrong with it. It was kind of annoying but I feel like all sims are that way. I want to be able to run different airports!!!! And a mode that just goes on forever would be awesome.
- ssully 12y agoI like it! It's not for me at all, but it seems really well made. I am going to send it to a friend who is ATC and see what he thinks.
- lucb1e 12y agoI'm interested, please let us know what he says :)
- maroonblazer 12y agoI love this. It'd be great to have the option to turn on/off radio chatter, the sort you hear when listening to real ATC transmissions. Would definitely make the experience feel a bit more immersive.
- 0xffff2 12y agoYou can always open up http://www.liveatc.net/ http://www.liveatc.net/ in another tab.
- eccstartup 12y agoNo one knows there is a hyperbolic PDE out there?
- refurb 12y agoNice job! Pretty simple game, but you had me playing it for an hour!
- max0563 12y agoIs this not just a clone of http://www.atc-sim.com/ http://www.atc-sim.com/ ?
- rrggrr 12y agoawesome job
- rrggrr 12y agoWhy did I get downvoted for complementing the OP on a game I ended up playing for over an hour.
- tomelders 12y agoIt's because your comment didn't really add anything to the conversation. I didn't down vote you by the way, but HN frowns on such comments. In this instance though, when someone is showing the community their work, I feel it's a bit unfair to expect everyone who comments to have detailed and constructive feedback. Some people just want to say "awesome!" and I suspect the people submitting their work also want to hear that. Alas, it's a shortcoming. Perhaps up votes are the way to say "awesome".
- asherdavidson 12y agoThis is a lot of fun. I've always been a huge fan of flight sims, but I never realized that ATC was just as much fun. Just a few notes: * All the planes enter at 90 degree angles. I assume this is intentional, but it would be nice to have semi-random entry angles. * There are a fixed number of planes in the simulation. It would be more challenging and fun if more planes would arrive while I'm taking care of the others. * The words are small and hard to read. All in all I think this is a really cool simulation. I can see myself wasting many more hours on it. Thanks!
- dsl 12y agoIf this is something you find interesting and like flight sims, you should check out some of the live ATC groups. http://www.bostonvirtualatc.com/ http://www.bostonvirtualatc.com/ and others allow you to work as a controller for a virtual airspace populated by human "pilots."
- asherdavidson 12y agoIt's funny you mention BVA. I joined them many years ago (before FSX closed gamespy) and I flew with them quite a bit. I think I was just a little intimidated by how professional they were. I did a few of their lessons, and then I went back to free flight in the offline sim where I could take off the from the taxi ways :).
- astrobe_ 12y agoI flew virtually with real life general aviation pilots, some of them assuming the role of the ATC in the sim; or else players would proceed like with uncontrolled airstrips in real life: announcing take-offs, landings, etc. on the "frequency" (a channel on a teamspeak server, one for each airport). For someone like me who is has never flown a plane, it added kind of an RPG aspect to the simulation.
- RoseO 12y agoI used to work on quite a large Flight Sim website a few years back and a lot of our users would do this. It gets interesting when you have 20+ people in an area because people do not fly as perfectly as shown in any ATC simulator.
- albumedia 12y agoAwesome work, I like it.
- dejawu 12y agoThis is great. After a few minutes of being frantically overwhelmed I gradually figured things out. Cool to see what ATC has to deal with, I was always curious how that looked. There are two things I'd like to see: - More than two speed options. A slider, if possible? - Some sort of simple scripting. I'd like to be able to dial in, "Navigate to WAYPOINT, then when you reach that, navigate to OTHER WAYPOINT, then descend to 5000 feet, then land on runway XX."
- dsl 12y agoWaypoint scripting would be counter to how ATC works. The challenge is remembering your plan for each plane and mentally queuing up the instructions you need to give to pilots.
- JonahBraun 12y agoYou could in the terminal based atc from BSD games. Great fun.
- bdonlan 12y agoExcept that real ATC can indeed give instructions of that sort. It's not so common for terminal environments to give really long clearances during approach because the pilots may not be ready to copy them down right away, but instructions like 'fly direct WAYPOINT, cross WAYPOINT at or above 5000 then descend at pilot's discretion to 2500' are common enough a bit further out.
- jrockway 12y agoI've found a new way to make airports handle twice as many departures per hour: send a plane to each end and tell them to take off at the same time! So far: 0 crashes! It's the counter-intuitive out-of-the-box thinking that I come to HN for!
- jamesaguilar 12y agoDon't you lose points for that? The tutorial says when planes pass too close, it hurts your score.
- waterlesscloud 12y agoDisrupting the ATC space. Like Uber for air traffic!
- jrockway 12y agoI'll even add a $1 "Safe Departures Fee".
- fnordfnordfnord 12y ago* During holiday surge pricing the Safe Departure Fee may be as much as $25.00.
- zlsa 12y agoThat was a bug and should have been fixed. Sorry.
- known 12y agohttp://www.flightradar24.com/ http://www.flightradar24.com/ shows live flight tracker
- raquo 12y agoThose planes are broken, they don't follow my commands for some reason...
- vhost- 12y agoDammit, you opened up a can of worms. Now I've been at this for hours. http://www.northkoreatech.org/2014/08/01/whos-using-north-korean-airspace/ http://www.northkoreatech.org/2014/08/01/whos-using-north-ko...
- lucio 12y agoare we just highly technified ants?
- lucb1e 12y agoWow, not just airplanes: http://www.flightradar24.com/HBAL296/50a38f2 http://www.flightradar24.com/HBAL296/50a38f2
- nilkn 12y agoAnother similar map: https://flightaware.com/live/ https://flightaware.com/live/
- dshankar 12y agoFYI, it's open source: https://github.com/zlsa/atc https://github.com/zlsa/atc
- fnordfnordfnord 12y agoI didn't want to be reminded how terrible ATCs' consoles are. The game is super neat though.
- ForFreedom 12y agoTo get it to land is pretty difficult. How can I know the altitude, speed?
- kissickas 12y agoAltitude is the first number, speed is the second number. Try using "fix x" to set the plane on the waypoints along the runway, c 1, then land runway.
- jimmcslim 12y agoSome indication of when aircraft are risking violation of separation would be handy, I assume that real ATC consoles have this? Its unclear what the scale is. Voices would be great. Emergencies (minimal fuel, medical, etc) and weather would also be great!
- ForFreedom 12y agoIs there an equivalent for ATC on the MAC?
- jarsj 12y agoHas anyone able to crash 2 planes yet ? I tried landing one on a runway while other was taxied, nothing happened.
- aluhut 12y agoThank you! A printable list of commands would be nice.
- popey456963 12y agoI'm currently working on this at the wiki, although I've only completed three right now: https://github.com/zlsa/atc/wiki https://github.com/zlsa/atc/wiki If you want to contribute, please do!
- aluhut 12y agoI'm pretty much a beginner. I think the last time I saw a similar game was on my C64 ;) Thanks for the commands :)
- VLM 12y agoCan someone suggest a sim that handles real procedural / system design issues properly, like the difference between being a terminal ATC or a ARTCC ATC? The real world is more of a team approach and most game sims have a pretty distorted view of reality. The guy who's doing ground taxi control at a tower doesn't usually moonlight at simultaneously running approach control while also simultaneously running departure control and enroute. A dude running approach 200 miles away usually doesn't get to play tower 200 miles away to tell a plane when they get to take off. In my experience with aviation and ATC games, I haven't found one yet where the game designer was a pilot or ATC or listened on a scanner to pilots and ATC during the design phase. I've also never seen a sim that handles dynamics for anything but planes. Real ATC is all about handling very local weather, and NOTAMS, and hot/cold MOAs (military training areas, if cold you just fly thru, if hot you get out of the way or get shot down). And of course it changes in real time not just once at game start. Also you trade / share space with other ATCs, so that dynamic would be interesting. And your shift doesn't end when all the planes land, you'll always both start and end a shift with planes in the air. I don't expect much from the arcade games but there have been some sims out there that at least graphically have tried to look realistic and have at least sorta realistic procedures and limitations.
- bencoder 12y agoI think http://www.londoncontrol.com/ http://www.londoncontrol.com/ is the closest one out there to what you're looking for
- rwmj 12y agoThere was a ZX Spectrum ATC game which (considering 1983 hardware) was reasonably accurate: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0002270 http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0002270 It was written by an actual air traffic controller and pilot (picture: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/showmag.cgi?mag=BigK/Issue03/Pages/BigK0300022.jpg http://www.worldofspectrum.org/showmag.cgi?mag=BigK/Issue03/...)
- Knox32 12y agoNice
- Knox32 12y agoNice
- Knox32 12y agoNice
- lucb1e 12y agoFun, but not as good as the ATC game I know from the bsdgames package in many Linux distributions. This is a lot more graphical but there are a few disadvantages, mostly regarding input: - Callsigns are long. In, let's call it bsdgames ATC, you have to type only one letter to indicate an aircraft. When Z is reached, you've long cleared A so the letter can be reused. This is more realistic though, I guess. - It is not clear to me what an aircraft wants. Do all the flying ones want to land and all the landed ones to fly? Because in bsdgames ATC they each have a destination. - The locations on the map (where you can fix an aircraft on, the triangles) are small and you have to properly look to make sure you typed it correctly. There is no highlighting like for planes. - Runways are even harder to read. Here too there is no highlighting like for planes. - You cannot send, as bsdgames ATC calls it, delayed commands (e.g. "N926JW fix QUITE then turn 0"). - You can not set an aircraft in "ignore mode", or otherwise mark it as "I have finished giving it directions". - There is no command autocompletion. In bsdgames ATC you type "atdab0" to indicate "plane A, Turn to direction D (90 degrees) At Beacon 0." Or as the game displays it while you type the letters: "a: turn to 90 at beacon #0". After typing every letter, the game will display the next word to indicate it understood. (E.g. typing "at" it will display "a: turn to" and "atda" displays "a: turn to 90 at".) There are a few things I really like though: - The score system makes it not immediately 'game over' when you make a single simple mistake. - It not only looks more modern, but because it's graphical and not ASCII there is a lot more space on the map to maneuver (at least it looks like that, maybe there are simply more planes). It also gives way more space for fix locations (triangles). - Either this is common for ATC systems, or it looks like the good old bsdgames ATC. I like that it is a modern version which, with rather minor improvements, is better than the original.
- zlsa 12y agoAuthor here. - I wanted to be a realistic as possible, hence the long callsigns. However, all you have to type is the shortest unique callsign and that aircraft will be selected. - If the aircraft has a red strip, it wants to land; if it's blue, it wants to takeoff and depart the area. - The fix names are now bigger. - The runway names are bigger. I'll make them more obvious, too. - You cannot send delayed commands, just like real life. - You can type "baw1234 tu 90 d 3 sp 2"; like callsigns, you only have to type the unique first few characters of the commands.
- pizzashark 12y agoI wish the planes continued to generate rather than having a fixed amount. I don't like when I run out of planes.
- jgeorge 12y agoI used to play an old Windows game called Tracon that was very similar, that I would get totally lost playing way longer than I ever intended. Good job! I prefer my ATC simulators with a little more realism than the bsdgames one. I like actual callsigns instead of letters.