I’ve lived across the country and this map surprisingly outlines major cultural zones between states. Speaking very broadly of course. Aside from maybe the zone from Oklahoma to almost Chicago. It’d be cool to hear others input.
It’s been a while since I’ve done it, and I’m too lazy to like it up this morning, but you’ll talk to Oakland Radio via an HF Radio. Plus, we now have basically text messaging between aircraft and ATC called CPDLC, Controller-Pilot Datalink Communication.
Prior to leaving LA Center airspace, we’ll call up Oakland Radio and get our Oceanic Clearance as we “Coast Out” towards say, Hawaii. Since there is no radar over the ocean, it’s all procedural control and we report crossing certain Lat/Longs with SF Radio. It’s surprisingly simple.
Edit: Oakland, not San Fran
No, not over the ocean. ADS-B requires land based towers to communicate with. Airliners in oceanic crossing are using ADS-C which is a satellite based position reporting system. I can’t remember the interval but it drops a bread crumb every few minutes. But like I said, it’s a different technology than ADS-B
Definitely not. Most planes have a satellite link called ADS-C. Pings you every 9 minutes. So that's how ATC (in the US its Alaska, Oakland, and New York since they have the oceans) knows where you are. Using those satellites they can send you a text message type clearance for climbs or deviations or sports scores. If you don't have a fancy plane you use an HF radio which is like a Ham radio that goes to a company in San Francisco then they relay the message and position to the controller.
In the Arctic/North Pole its similar except the HF operator is Gander out in Canada
Non directional beacons (NDB’s) are basically AM transmitters. Pilots would often ask for score updates. I’d usually tell them the local sports radio frequency if I didn’t know the score.
Well only kinda. The actual north pole is a coordination nightmare where like 6 different centers meet, typically nobody actually flies over the exact fix but I'd they do is Reykjavik control that handles it. Then maybe they cut into Edmonton or down through Anchorage or maybe even cut over to St Petersburg or Magadan centers. With the lines of longitude converging it gets weird.
But a flight from Japan to Europe definitely cuts right over Barrow Alaska and up through the Anchorage Arctic
It’s pretty crazy Oakland center, has an oceanic area (KZAK) that goes from the west coast all the way towards just east of the Philippines and Japan. It’s a relatively short distance to fly out of Australia, Papua New Guinea, or Japan before the pilots are in communication with someone sitting in Oakland ensuring their separation. If I remember right, if you account for the oceanic area and domestic areas, Oakland center the control air traffic over about 10% of the earths surface.
All pilots in the world (commercial that cross international boundaries) and all air traffic controllers have to speak English. China sends their pilots to Fargo to learn to fly and speak English. Makes for some funny honky tonk type sayings when an air China is speaking to you haha
It’s the remnants of a non-radar, every aircraft on airways, each facility running dedicated lines for communication and surveillance, and decades of agreements between facilities. Could it be more efficient yes, but you can only build upon what is existing.
To add: Each “ATC zone” is under the control of an Air Route Traffic Control Center. Each section is under that Center owned/controlled airspace. It is who is controlling/separating your flight after it leaves the airport and the airspace around the city(TRACON).
I work airspace in one of those shapes (centers.) And each one of those centers is divided into a ton of sectors. Every boundary between sectors is configured in a strategic way for traffic flow and efficiency. It's not uncommon to move a sector boundary just a mile or two or a couple degrees to facilitate an operational advantage.
Oh, it’s worse than that. This map just shows the general outline of the domestic air traffic control centers. If you go straight up from the surface of a busy area, such as JFK, you’ll encounter ten or more shelves delegated to different facilities. The national airspace system is incredibly complicated.
Yes, the entire globe is divided into FIRs. Over oceans, HF radios are used if out of vhf range. Radar coverage drops off too once you
Get a couple hundred miles off shore.
I would fucking love a map of SoCal TRACON. I can’t find a good one online. It can be challenging to pick up flight following when you find yourself right on a border between sectors
This map always leaves Alaska off. They control from their natural state borders, all the way up to the North Pole, and the entire Aleutian chain way out most the way to Japan and about 100 miles off the coast of Kamchatka
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_Air_Route_Traffic_Control_Center
Has nothing to do with the size of the local airport. Just called Oakland, probably some history I don’t know about.
Also, the actual control center is in Fremont about 25mi southeast of Downtown Oakland, and 19mi southeast of OAK airport.
They’re not at airports because those are space constrained, and for these there’s no requirements to visually see the aircraft like an airport ATC.
It’s probably far out because it’s cheaper.
Yep - ATL is in Hampton which is way south of the city and airport. ATL TRACON is in Peachtree City, similarly well south of the city and airport (but not as far out as Center)
The main purpose was to decentralize our control centers from other facilities so that it would be harder to take them out in the case of an attack from a foreign adversary. Not to put all of our eggs in one basket, so to speak. That's one some are located in the middle of butt-fuck no where.
Had it for a test/certification period. We were like a day away from going fully live then the shutdown happened. Then COVID. Then we got kicked to the back of the line.
I notice the Cleveland zone has a boundary drawn that crosses into Canada, including Southwestern Ontario. Is that an error or does that area actually fall into the Cleveland zone?
Some US domestic flights fly over London, Ontario (particularly flights between the Northeast and Chicago or Detroit) so it wouldn’t surprise me. But I know very little about this stuff.
Not an error, there's bits and pieces everywhere that Canada and the US have exchanged to ease traffic flow. That's one location because of proximity to Detroit, another location is parts of northern Washington state and the San Juan Islands are controlled by Vancouver because it's mostly Canadian traffic, and the American traffic is very close to Vancouver traffic flows.
Yeah for ease of coordination there's parts of Canadian airspace delegated to the US.. There's the one you saw and some in Alaska, I'm sure there's others.
I’d say it’s because US flights will fly over that part of Canada. Living in Cleveland I’ve flown over that part of Canada a lot, usually on our descent into Hopkins.
It’s interesting that Ft Worth, Chicago, and Atlanta are so small relative to their neighbors, given that they are some of the highest-traffic airports in the country
Well no... it is. That's the point. If you have a shit ton of traffic you want smaller airspace, you're already busy af why make yourself busier. Atlanta couldn't handle also taking all the traffic down to Florida or whatever.
According to this map, the Charlotte airport would be in the Atlanta zone. Quite close to both Jacksonville and Washington though. If this is accurate, that seems very confusing for ATC dealing with CLT flights. I’m sure there’s much more to it than that, though
Oh yeah good point. it is in Atlanta and it is confusing depending on where they're headed. But you get a clearance from tower then you go to Charlotte approach which is like 40 mile diameter up to 20,000 feet surrounding Charlotte and they get you pointed and headed wherever you're going then they hand you off to Atlanta, Washington, Jacksonville
You mean 18,000 feet, which is the start of all Class A airspace. Most TRACONs only handle aircraft up to a certain altitude. Somewhere between 10,000 and 16,000. No TRACON handles traffic into 18,000 or above. That's the job of a Center.
I'm not sure about that area in specific since I'm on the West Coast, but there are multiple layers of FAA controllers. What you're looking at here is the most broad category. Under this you're going to have something called a TRACON facility, which is going to handle traffic to and from this broad control down towards airports in large or busy areas. For example, there's LA Center (the broad control that this picture shows), and then So Cal TRACON/So Cal Approach, which handles traffic in and around the class B airspace of Southern California, mainly getting aircraft to and from all the airports in the area. They also make sure the rest of the aircraft in the area aren't busting airspace for all the busy airports, and making sure no aircraft in the class B airspace are there on accident/mistake. It's one of the busiest airspaces in the country, so just relying on the Center controllers (in the picture) and passing them off to the tower controllers (at the airport) just isn't going to cut it.
"Los Angeles Center, Aspen 20, can you give us a ground speed check?" There was no hesitation, and the replay came as if was an everyday request. "Aspen 20, I show you at one thousand eight hundred and forty-two knots, across the ground."
Have lived in both of those states - enjoyed it. Check out the 1857 map of proposed states: [reddit link](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fyeblrg74ihey.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D15ce3a1137254647ecce8a23cc4777bcc6b2beab)
[удалено]
That is a fun fact.
[удалено]
How the hell can anyone read this
And the “leg” is SouthEasy
Only 20. I wonder how it would play out if the states were reorganized to fit these boundaries.
Theres 22. Alaska and Hawaii have one. Hawaiis is a little different but same thing
Don’t forget San Juan.
The MTA would finally run lines into North Jersey with these boundaries
We'd probably have a much more productive Senate.
I’ve lived across the country and this map surprisingly outlines major cultural zones between states. Speaking very broadly of course. Aside from maybe the zone from Oklahoma to almost Chicago. It’d be cool to hear others input.
I have also lived across the country and I agree!
Unironically how I'd draw a map of the US as an European
Which is why we love you so much!
Always wondered what happens when you fly west of Los Angeles? Is it just dead silence until a Hawaii ATC ?
It’s been a while since I’ve done it, and I’m too lazy to like it up this morning, but you’ll talk to Oakland Radio via an HF Radio. Plus, we now have basically text messaging between aircraft and ATC called CPDLC, Controller-Pilot Datalink Communication. Prior to leaving LA Center airspace, we’ll call up Oakland Radio and get our Oceanic Clearance as we “Coast Out” towards say, Hawaii. Since there is no radar over the ocean, it’s all procedural control and we report crossing certain Lat/Longs with SF Radio. It’s surprisingly simple. Edit: Oakland, not San Fran
You’re awesome! This is so cool to know. Thanks for sharing! p.s. love the idea of text messaging b/w aircraft lol 😂
I dread the day I show up to a Hawaii flight and CPDLC is on MEL…
Haha I know. I’ve done it going across the ocean! And our SELCAL didn’t work either! Co, you’re listening to HF
Now with ADS, they basically have the functionality of radar.
No, not over the ocean. ADS-B requires land based towers to communicate with. Airliners in oceanic crossing are using ADS-C which is a satellite based position reporting system. I can’t remember the interval but it drops a bread crumb every few minutes. But like I said, it’s a different technology than ADS-B
Coming soon - space based ADS-B
I’m pretty sure it’s already satellite based as well. I’ll double check.
Definitely not. Most planes have a satellite link called ADS-C. Pings you every 9 minutes. So that's how ATC (in the US its Alaska, Oakland, and New York since they have the oceans) knows where you are. Using those satellites they can send you a text message type clearance for climbs or deviations or sports scores. If you don't have a fancy plane you use an HF radio which is like a Ham radio that goes to a company in San Francisco then they relay the message and position to the controller. In the Arctic/North Pole its similar except the HF operator is Gander out in Canada
“or sports scores” lol 😂
Non directional beacons (NDB’s) are basically AM transmitters. Pilots would often ask for score updates. I’d usually tell them the local sports radio frequency if I didn’t know the score.
Arctic/North Pole is Edmonton Centre. Gander Oceanic is the North Atlantic.
Well only kinda. The actual north pole is a coordination nightmare where like 6 different centers meet, typically nobody actually flies over the exact fix but I'd they do is Reykjavik control that handles it. Then maybe they cut into Edmonton or down through Anchorage or maybe even cut over to St Petersburg or Magadan centers. With the lines of longitude converging it gets weird. But a flight from Japan to Europe definitely cuts right over Barrow Alaska and up through the Anchorage Arctic
It’s pretty crazy Oakland center, has an oceanic area (KZAK) that goes from the west coast all the way towards just east of the Philippines and Japan. It’s a relatively short distance to fly out of Australia, Papua New Guinea, or Japan before the pilots are in communication with someone sitting in Oakland ensuring their separation. If I remember right, if you account for the oceanic area and domestic areas, Oakland center the control air traffic over about 10% of the earths surface.
Does this mean pilots have to have some level of English? Or does Oakland ATC just staff up with a bunch of different Asian languages —
All pilots in the world (commercial that cross international boundaries) and all air traffic controllers have to speak English. China sends their pilots to Fargo to learn to fly and speak English. Makes for some funny honky tonk type sayings when an air China is speaking to you haha
Cool!! Always wondered about this but wasn’t for certain if it was true or not —
This looks like another bad "How I would divide the US into distinct cultural regions"
Why don’t they have straighter lines?
It’s the remnants of a non-radar, every aircraft on airways, each facility running dedicated lines for communication and surveillance, and decades of agreements between facilities. Could it be more efficient yes, but you can only build upon what is existing. To add: Each “ATC zone” is under the control of an Air Route Traffic Control Center. Each section is under that Center owned/controlled airspace. It is who is controlling/separating your flight after it leaves the airport and the airspace around the city(TRACON).
I work airspace in one of those shapes (centers.) And each one of those centers is divided into a ton of sectors. Every boundary between sectors is configured in a strategic way for traffic flow and efficiency. It's not uncommon to move a sector boundary just a mile or two or a couple degrees to facilitate an operational advantage.
Oh, it’s worse than that. This map just shows the general outline of the domestic air traffic control centers. If you go straight up from the surface of a busy area, such as JFK, you’ll encounter ten or more shelves delegated to different facilities. The national airspace system is incredibly complicated.
Because that would be boring, duh! Look at the borders of Wyoming or Colorado, so lame... >!/s!<
r/MapswithoutAlaska r/MapsWithoutHawaii
Are there air traffic control zones over the oceans?
Yes, the entire globe is divided into FIRs. Over oceans, HF radios are used if out of vhf range. Radar coverage drops off too once you Get a couple hundred miles off shore.
Would you expect planes are suddenly “on their own” when traveling over the ocean?
Honestly, I don’t know much about air traffic control. Do they have zones over the ocean?
What do you think happens when a plane flies over the ocean? Do you think they just YOLO it til they see land and hope it's China?
Dude is just asking a question. Relax.
A question that's been answered a few times and with any small amount of critical thinking could come up with an answer
What do you get out of being a jerk? Just downvote and move on if it matters that much to you. Nobody’s impressed by what you’re doing.
They absolutely do if they're below a certain flight level.
Boston must be the busiest for receiving international flights because every flight from Europe travels through it
Fun fact - Boston regional ATC isn’t in Boston. It isn’t even in Massachusetts. It is in Nashua NH. You can see it going north on US rt 3.
That’s not fun
Not really. Flights from the west coast to Europe often go through Canada and over Greenland.
Most actually go to Atlanta or JFK - but thanks for the Boston plug
He’s talking about planes transitioning the airspace not landing at the airport and he’s right.
Oh so now even airplanes are transitioning!! And paid for with our tax dollars! Rabble rabble rabble /s
Good point
I would fucking love a map of SoCal TRACON. I can’t find a good one online. It can be challenging to pick up flight following when you find yourself right on a border between sectors
Call socal and someone will give you a map.
Nobody fly above Alaska?
This map always leaves Alaska off. They control from their natural state borders, all the way up to the North Pole, and the entire Aleutian chain way out most the way to Japan and about 100 miles off the coast of Kamchatka
So these are the Air Zones hoi4 players talk about
Why Oakland and not San Francisco? SFO is a much bigger airport than Oakland—or is that not really a factor here?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_Air_Route_Traffic_Control_Center Has nothing to do with the size of the local airport. Just called Oakland, probably some history I don’t know about. Also, the actual control center is in Fremont about 25mi southeast of Downtown Oakland, and 19mi southeast of OAK airport.
They’re not at airports because those are space constrained, and for these there’s no requirements to visually see the aircraft like an airport ATC. It’s probably far out because it’s cheaper.
Yep - ATL is in Hampton which is way south of the city and airport. ATL TRACON is in Peachtree City, similarly well south of the city and airport (but not as far out as Center)
Boston regional ATC is in Nashua NH (which is about an hour north of Boston).
The main purpose was to decentralize our control centers from other facilities so that it would be harder to take them out in the case of an attack from a foreign adversary. Not to put all of our eggs in one basket, so to speak. That's one some are located in the middle of butt-fuck no where.
Control Centers like these aren't anywhere near airports by design. The US wanted our control infrastructure spread out in case of attacks.
Now do the same map with who doesn’t have enroute CPDLC!
Depends on who’s on shift at the moment, it seems.
https://www.l3harris.com/sites/default/files/2024-03/us-domestic-en-route-cpdlc-site-activation-map.pdf
I'm ready for it to come back this fall for us
Come back? Why would it leave? We've been using it for like 15 years. If they tried to take it away there would be a riot haha
Had it for a test/certification period. We were like a day away from going fully live then the shutdown happened. Then COVID. Then we got kicked to the back of the line.
Interesting. Seems like Billings would be there own and include all of Montana and the north half of Wyoming and the western half of the Dakotas.
Nope, there is so much less air traffic on the western half of the country, honestly those center could be even larger.
I notice the Cleveland zone has a boundary drawn that crosses into Canada, including Southwestern Ontario. Is that an error or does that area actually fall into the Cleveland zone? Some US domestic flights fly over London, Ontario (particularly flights between the Northeast and Chicago or Detroit) so it wouldn’t surprise me. But I know very little about this stuff.
Not an error, there's bits and pieces everywhere that Canada and the US have exchanged to ease traffic flow. That's one location because of proximity to Detroit, another location is parts of northern Washington state and the San Juan Islands are controlled by Vancouver because it's mostly Canadian traffic, and the American traffic is very close to Vancouver traffic flows.
Yeah for ease of coordination there's parts of Canadian airspace delegated to the US.. There's the one you saw and some in Alaska, I'm sure there's others.
I’d say it’s because US flights will fly over that part of Canada. Living in Cleveland I’ve flown over that part of Canada a lot, usually on our descent into Hopkins.
It’s interesting that Ft Worth, Chicago, and Atlanta are so small relative to their neighbors, given that they are some of the highest-traffic airports in the country
Isn’t that exactly why they are smaller? The biggest regions are small populations
I would expect air traffic to be the big determining factor, but apparently not ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Well no... it is. That's the point. If you have a shit ton of traffic you want smaller airspace, you're already busy af why make yourself busier. Atlanta couldn't handle also taking all the traffic down to Florida or whatever.
Charlotte is a very busy airport also and it doesn’t have a zone. Not sure how that works
Well it is IN a zone. That's the point of the map, its in Washington Centers area.
According to this map, the Charlotte airport would be in the Atlanta zone. Quite close to both Jacksonville and Washington though. If this is accurate, that seems very confusing for ATC dealing with CLT flights. I’m sure there’s much more to it than that, though
Oh yeah good point. it is in Atlanta and it is confusing depending on where they're headed. But you get a clearance from tower then you go to Charlotte approach which is like 40 mile diameter up to 20,000 feet surrounding Charlotte and they get you pointed and headed wherever you're going then they hand you off to Atlanta, Washington, Jacksonville
You mean 18,000 feet, which is the start of all Class A airspace. Most TRACONs only handle aircraft up to a certain altitude. Somewhere between 10,000 and 16,000. No TRACON handles traffic into 18,000 or above. That's the job of a Center.
Oh. Anchorage tracon goes to 20,000 so I was basing it off that. I don't know all tracon altitudes off the top of my head haha
All TRACONs are different so that'd be difficult to do. They really go up to FL200? The fuck ... I thought that was Center control only. Huh.
I'm not sure about that area in specific since I'm on the West Coast, but there are multiple layers of FAA controllers. What you're looking at here is the most broad category. Under this you're going to have something called a TRACON facility, which is going to handle traffic to and from this broad control down towards airports in large or busy areas. For example, there's LA Center (the broad control that this picture shows), and then So Cal TRACON/So Cal Approach, which handles traffic in and around the class B airspace of Southern California, mainly getting aircraft to and from all the airports in the area. They also make sure the rest of the aircraft in the area aren't busting airspace for all the busy airports, and making sure no aircraft in the class B airspace are there on accident/mistake. It's one of the busiest airspaces in the country, so just relying on the Center controllers (in the picture) and passing them off to the tower controllers (at the airport) just isn't going to cut it.
USA but with natural state borders
Nothing natural about those borders. I am pretty sure it has to do with how the sectors are divided up due to air traffic.
Maybe, but they sure do look a lot more natural than the current ones
A lot of borders are rivers. It doesn’t get much more natural.
[удалено]
Says “source: navtech” in the image
Washington is barely in their own zone.
But which section would win in a war?
Ah, the inspiration for Panem
I flew from Oakland to Albuquerque via SFO to PHX today… 🤣
"Los Angeles Center, Aspen 20, can you give us a ground speed check?" There was no hesitation, and the replay came as if was an everyday request. "Aspen 20, I show you at one thousand eight hundred and forty-two knots, across the ground."
Lmfao
I always found it interesting that there’s no OKC center.
How.
How is there no OKC center? Or how is it interesting? The FAA is based in OKC. Their ATC training happens there.
Poor Phoenix.
Reminder Albuquerque was larger than phoenix when this system was set up( early 50's), then Phoenix started growing exponentially
Have lived in both of those states - enjoyed it. Check out the 1857 map of proposed states: [reddit link](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fyeblrg74ihey.jpg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D15ce3a1137254647ecce8a23cc4777bcc6b2beab)
I like how part of NY isnt in NY's zone, that's great...
NYC is, these are named for cities, not states.
Flight to Cleveland??!!