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

  • somewhere just south of the tip of Greenland.

  • And there's no radar coverage up here,

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

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

  • So, how do we keep safe?

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

  • The answer is down at my destination.

  • GPS: "Continue for 205 miles."

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

  • And if you're over the North Atlantic,

  • these are some of the folks keeping you safe.

  • - The North Atlantic tracks are the airways

  • that we develop each day for our eastbound aircraft

  • who fly across from us over to the UK area.

  • The westbound tracks are produced

  • by our counterpart over in Scotland via Prestwick Centre.

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

  • During the night time, our night time here,

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

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

  • It's a 24 hour operation obviously.

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

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

  • So I'll take that into consideration.

  • I'll also look at weather models.

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

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

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

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

  • anywhere from 8 to 10, 12 hours

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

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

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

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

  • And also, the tracks are three dimensional.

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

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

  • or by altitude.

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

  • every 10 degrees of longitude.

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

  • and we update our system,

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

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

  • with the aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean.

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

  • and contact them through HF.

  • The easiest way for us, I guess,

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

  • I can just click on a button,

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

  • It's very precise, even without radar.

  • As a normal standard for our tracks,

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

  • we're running 60 nautical miles apart.

  • As time progresses, airlines get better equipped,

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

  • Longitudinal, which is one aircraft behind the other,

  • we're running 10 minutes.

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

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

  • Some nights, you can just sit out on your patio

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

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

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

  • They just have to be separated in one dimension basically.

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

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

  • traffic permitting obviously, right?

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

  • They have their TCAS.

  • TCAS is their Traffic Collision Avoidance System.

  • For instance, if you had two aircraft

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

  • climbed up into another aircraft,

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

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

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

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

  • and we provide a conflict free clearance for that aircraft,

  • safety being the number one thing here.

  • - Thank you very much to everyone at Nav Canada,

  • and at the Gander Area Control Centre.

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

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

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B2 中高級

在沒有雷達的情況下保證飛機安全。北大西洋軌道 (Keeping Aircraft Safe without Radar: The North Atlantic Tracks)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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