Air Traffic Control Entities

 Air Traffic Control Entities

    For this week's blog, I will be discussing and comparing different Air Traffic Control Entities.  The two I will be comparing will be Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) and Shanwick Oceanic Control Area.  Both of these ATC entities provide direction and safety for aircraft in the air.  

    ARTCC's main purpose is to control aircraft traffic in the air while they are traveling from one airport to another (Air Route Traffic Control Center, 2021).  They use IFR to communicate with the aircraft once they are under their control, around 1200 ft above ground level (Air Route Traffic Control Center, 2021).  They verify and assign altitudes to aircraft to prevent in-flight collisions or mishaps and also issues route assignments (Air Route Traffic Control Center, 2021).  There are 22 Air Route Control Centers across the United States (Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCC), 2020).

    The Shanwick Oceanic Control Area (OCA) is airspace that is controlled by the United Kingdom (Blackmore et al., 2014). It is often referred to as "the gateway to Europe" since close to 80 percent of all Oceanic air traffic passes through it and is also the busiest of all North Atlantic Airspace regions (Blackmore et al., 2014).  The OCA is made up of 700,000 square miles of sky and is controlled by NATS (Blackmore et al., 2014).
  
    Both the ARTCC and Shanwick Oceanic Control area are similar in the fact that they control aircraft that are in the air and traveling from one airport to another.  The ARTCC is what controls the aircraft in the U.S., while OCA controls aircraft flying across the Atlantic (Blackmore et al., 2014).





Refrences

Blackmore, C., Molloy, J., Heggarty, H., & Carr, J. (2014, August 11). North Atlantic Skies – 

            The gateway to Europe. NATS Blog. https://nats.aero/blog/2014/06/north-atlantic-skies-

            gateway-europe/.

Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCC). (2020, August 20). Federal Aviation Administration. https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ato/service_units/air_traffic_services/artcc/

Air Route Traffic Control Center. (2021). CFI Notebook. https://www.cfinotebook.net/notebook/air-traffic-control/air-route-traffic-control-center

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