FAA Air Traffic Control and Pilots — An Essential Aviation Partnership

 

As a pilot, air traffic controllers are your best friends: your partners in the sky.  Aviation wouldn’t be what is today without them, world-wide.  In the U.S. this year we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic Control (ATC) division.

 

Just a few statistics to astonish you: there are 15,000 air traffic controllers at 263 control towers, 29 Tracons, and 21 Centers to handle more than 50,000 flights a day.  When you train at Phoenix East Aviation in Daytona Beach, Florida, you will be one of these 50,000 flights. That’s an annual workload of handling over 18 million flights a year — safely, of course, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

 

ATC in the U.S. first started in 1936 in only three airports: Newark, New Jersey; Chicago, Illinois; and Cleveland, Ohio. At that time it had only a crew of 15 air traffic controllers. There ws not even radar in those days.

 

You can be one of the pilots speaking on the radio to an ATC controller.  To find out more, see www.pea.com. That’s your starting place to become a pilot.