Nick had been warning me that our flying has been outpacing our ground work and that more ground lessons were imminent. Well, it finally caught up with me, so for this lesson and the next I will be stuck on the ground in a small classroom with my instructor. Yuk! 
This lesson covered the Jeppesen syllabus ground lesson 7 topic; Air Traffic Control. We talked about Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC), Processing IFR Flight Plans, Weather Information, Terminal Facilities, Clearance Delivery, the Control Tower, and Approach/Departure Control. If I to summarize the lesson in one sentence it would be; Who do you talk to, for what purpose, and when? For example, when departing a class D airport, assuming you’ve already filed your IFR flight plan with FSS (by phone or online) and listened to ATIS, you would contact ground control and inform them that you are going to be IFR. Ground will then typically coordinate your clearance with ATC, and clear you to taxi to the active runway. Once your run-up is complete, you would then talk to Tower who would clear you for take-off and departure, but you may have to wait a bit until your route of departure/flight is clear of other IFR traffic. Once you’ve departed, Tower will then tell you to contact Departure Control on the frequency that was given to you in your clearance by ground (more on clearances later). You may fly out of Departure’s area and be passed off to Center, who, when you’re nearing your destination will often tell you to contact Approach control, with the process now reverseing itself.
In my case, Norcal Departure is always involved because I am departing from an airport in a busy metropolitan area with several large airports, but I suppose that if you were in a more remote area not served by Approach you might get passed from directly from Tower to Center. To tell you the truth I am not sure about that, so if you are reading this and you know, please post a comment and set me straight.
Ok so that’s one lesson down, three to go. Next topic, Clearances.
0 Responses to “Ground - Air Traffic Control”