You are not flying a plane. You are the person on the ground telling a dozen planes where to go — by speaking to them. This page walks through your first shift: what you are looking at, what to say, and how to land your first aircraft. No aviation knowledge assumed.
The dark screen is a radar display. Each small marker is one real-sized airliner carrying a few hundred passengers, and the trail behind it shows where it has just been. Next to each marker is a label with four things: which airline and flight it is, how high it is, how fast it is going, and which way it is pointed.
Everything on that screen is moving, all the time. Aircraft enter from the edges high up and far away, pointed in whatever direction they happened to arrive in — usually not at the runway. Nobody up there can see anybody else. You can see all of them. That asymmetry is the entire game.
What you are trying to do
Land every arriving aircraft, one after another, without letting any two get too close together.
That is genuinely it. The complications are that aircraft arrive faster than the runway can take them, they arrive from different directions at different heights, and a plane cannot stop or reverse while you think. So the job is really about order: deciding who lands first, second and third, then turning and descending each one until it lines up.
Two aircraft must never be closer than three miles apart horizontally unless one is a thousand feet above the other. Keeping that gap is called maintaining separation, and it is the one rule that matters more than being efficient.
Your first command
Hold the talk button and say one sentence. It has two parts: who you are talking to, then what you want them to do.
“Air India 302, turn left heading 270.”
The pilot reads it back — “left heading 270, Air India 302” — and the marker on your radar starts banking left. That readback is how you know you were understood. If you were not, the pilot will say so and ask you to repeat, exactly as a real crew would.
A heading is just a compass direction in degrees: 360 is north, 090 east, 180 south, 270 west. You do not need to memorise them; the screen shows you which way each aircraft is pointed.
You do not have to speak perfectly. The game understands ordinary phrasing — “drop down to 5000” works as well as “descend and maintain 5000” — and if you would rather not use a microphone at all, every instruction can be typed.
The four things you can ask for
Once the first turn works, the rest of the game is combinations of four instructions.
Turn
Point an aircraft in a new direction. Used to space arrivals out, and to line them up with the runway.
Descend or climb
Change an aircraft's altitude. Arrivals need to come down gradually; it is also how you get one aircraft safely over another.
Speed up or slow down
Fine-tune the gap between two aircraft without changing where they are pointed.
Clear for the approach
Hand the aircraft over to the automatic guidance system that flies it down to the runway. This is the last thing you do for each arrival.
How landing actually happens
You never fly an aircraft onto the runway yourself. Instead you deliver it into a narrow window in the sky where the airport's landing guidance system can pick it up. That system is called the ILS, and it is two radio beams: one telling the aircraft whether it is left or right of the runway centreline, the other telling it whether it is high or low.
The window is genuinely narrow. The aircraft has to arrive roughly 10 to 14 miles out, pointed within about 30 degrees of the runway direction, and below the descent path — not above it, because an aircraft cannot capture a beam from above. Getting each arrival into that window, in the right order, is the puzzle.
Once it locks on, the aircraft flies itself down and you hand it to the Tower controller who owns the runway. Then you go back to the queue.
The guided shift begins with a single aircraft and one instruction, and adds one idea at a time. It is free, needs no account, and works in the browser.
