WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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- I am 35,000 feet above
the North Atlantic,

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somewhere just south of
the tip of Greenland.

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And there's no radar coverage up here,

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there's no real-time view
for an air traffic controller to know

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where all the hundreds of planes
sharing this airspace currently are.

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So, how do we keep safe?

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How do we avoid getting
a bit too close to any of them?

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The answer is down at my destination.

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GPS: "Continue for 205 miles."

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This is the Nav Canada Area Control Centre
in Gander, Newfoundland.

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And if you're over the North Atlantic,

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these are some of the
folks keeping you safe.

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- The North Atlantic
tracks are the airways

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that we develop each day
for our eastbound aircraft

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who fly across from us
over to the UK area.

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The westbound tracks are produced

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by our counterpart over in Scotland
via Prestwick Centre.

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The way the North Atlantic works,
there's basically two main airflows.

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During the night time,
our night time here,

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most of the aircraft leave North America
and fly across to the UK.

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And during the daytime,
most of those same aircraft return.

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It's a 24 hour operation obviously.

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We start with our day-shift,
comes in early in the morning.

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We'll ask all these aircraft to send in
their preferred routes for that night.

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So I'll take that into consideration.

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I'll also look at weather models.

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Eastbound aircraft, all the aircraft want
to get into the main jet stream

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to pick up that tailwind
so they can save money and fuel and time.

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From all that, we'll develop
a set of tracks based on that flow,

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and once the tracks are published
in the morning, airlines then have

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anywhere from 8 to 10, 12 hours

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to decide on what track they
want to follow that night.

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- The tracks can look curved and inefficient
on the flat map projections we're used to

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but you've got to remember,
they're great circle routes.

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They're the shortest, and cheapest way
around the globe of the earth.

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And also, the tracks
are three dimensional.

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Planes can be separated because
they're on a different track,

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or because they're on different positions
on the same track,

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or by altitude.

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- It's a requirement for an aircraft
to give us a position report

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every 10 degrees of longitude.

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And we take that information,
and we apply it to the aircraft's route,

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and we update our system,

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and we can kinda predict
where he's gonna be too.

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When there's no radar coverage,
there's two main forms of communicating

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with the aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean.

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We can go through our radio operators,
our flight service operators,

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and contact them through HF.

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The easiest way for us, I guess,

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is like a form of text message,
you could call it.

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I can just click on a button,

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and I can tell exactly where that aircraft is
at that point in time.

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It's very precise, even without radar.

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As a normal standard for our tracks,

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side-by-side, which is
our lateral separation,

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we're running 60 nautical miles apart.

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As time progresses,
airlines get better equipped,

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we'll probably have all our tracks
at 30 miles apart from each other.

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Longitudinal, which is one
aircraft behind the other,

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we're running 10 minutes.

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We can reduce that down to a
five minute standard if airliners are equipped.

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And vertical, we're using 1,000 feet.

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Some nights, you can just
sit out on your patio

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on a nice clear night, and
you can see numerous aircraft,

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and they look like they're all
on top of each other, but basically,

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they're all at least 1,000 feet apart,
if not more.

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They just have to be separated
in one dimension basically.

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As soon as an aircraft gets too tight
to another aircraft, we interject and say,

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okay, we need to slow you down,
or speed you up,

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traffic permitting obviously, right?

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If a plane has an emergency,
they have contingency procedures.

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They have their TCAS.

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TCAS is their
Traffic Collision Avoidance System.

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For instance, if you had two aircraft

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and an aircraft did something
it wasn't supposed to do,

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climbed up into another aircraft,

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that plane has a TCAS system that says,
okay you have incoming traffic,

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you have to climb, or descend,
or whatever the resolution is, right?

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So as soon as we're made aware
of an emergency situation,

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we look at separation, we try
to move what aircraft we can,

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and we provide a conflict free
clearance for that aircraft,

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safety being the number one thing here.

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- Thank you very much to
everyone at Nav Canada,

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and at the Gander Area Control Centre.

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You can find out more about them
and the tracks at the links in the description.