Wayne Farley's Aviation Blog - Air Traffic Management

Air traffic controllers are super humans. Well, almost. Akin to the stripes on a tiger, here are a handful of characteristics that air traffic controllers must possess in order to keep aircraft safe in the skies.

The U.S. government shutdown has ground on beyond a month leaving controllers without a paycheck and some systems under-resourced.

The suspension of flights in and out of Gatwick due to drone sightings has brought the question of How to stop a Drone? into the limelight.

As the world observed International Literacy Day on Saturday 8th September, I paused to reflect on the books that I read that helped to shape my aviation career. I’ve read hundreds of books but here are the ones that have had the biggest impact.

In 2017, 4.1 billion passengers were carried by scheduled air carriers around the world. This equates to millions of flights which took off and arrived safely at their destination. With such a stellar performance, time out must be taken to acknowledge the collective efforts of aviation team members across the globe which made this possible. Of course there were a handful of flights that did not make it to their destination, but that number is dwindling.

With aeronautical information service being one of the important pillars for safe and efficient air navigation, the world aviation community is observing World Aeronautical Information Service (AIS) day on May 15, the anniversary of the adoption of Annex 15 to the Convention on International Civil Aviation.

NAV CANADA has completed a successful flight test of space-based Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) technology. The test was conducted to collect ADS-B data used for validating Aireon’s satellite aircraft surveillance and tracking service.

The World Meteorological Organization released its new digitized International Cloud Atlas, the global reference for observing and identifying clouds. It includes new classifications, including volutus, a roll cloud and asperitas, a dramatic undulated cloud.

Thousands of agreements have been inked since the dawn of the aviation industry. Agreements between states, organizations, service providers, and every other stakeholders. They bind parties to specific actions or layout the terms for cooperation that have mutual benefits. Air Traffic Services should ink these too.

It is not the critic who counts, the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly.

In these modern times where people can freely express themselves via social media and other means, here are some ways that an organizations can safeguard its reputation from people who set out to ruin it.