Unique Traffic Management in New York Skies
New York’s crowded skies demand unique New York-style traffic management. That’s why the FAA has created an only-in-New York position to make sure planes depart in the most efficient way possible.
These traffic management coordinators (TMCs) work in New York Center's Departure Complex, known locally as “The Pit.”
Controllers at New York Center, which handles planes at higher altitudes, often deal with more air traffic than any other en route facility in the country. But these busy controllers spin off some duties to TMCs to ensure that planes departing from more than two dozen airports in the region are following a flight path that won't need adjustment.
Otherwise, the already well-occupied controllers would have to take time away from guiding airplanes to make changes to flight plans, and that's the kind of inefficiency that leads to planes waiting at gates and passengers waiting on the ground.
Every few minutes 20 lines or more of text pop up on a flat panel screen. Each line represents a flight plan for a plane that wants to depart from one of the New York's airports. About 2,500 lines of text pop up each day, and a traffic management coordinator checks each and every one.
The TMCs in The Pit check each flight plan to make sure a pilot is going to fly along a reasonable path from the airport they are leaving, to the one they are scheduled to arrive at.
The Pit is unique to New York Center. At other en route centers, a controller working the radar assist position reviews the flight plans of planes headed for his sector once they have taken off. But because the airspace over New York is so dense and complex — and the controllers that manage it are almost always working full-bore — it makes for a more efficient operation to have a dedicated position available to check a flight’s plan before it leaves the gate.
The TMCs review a plane's scheduled course — whether it is headed from Dutchess County Airport to a small general aviation airport in Vermont, or from Newark International across the country to Los Angeles. And more often than not, the information they need to OK the plan is drawn from the TMC’s own head, a huge database of routes from New York to just about anywhere in the country.
Perhaps more amazing than the TMCs’ knowledge of the thousands of ways to get from New York to just about anywhere in the country, is the precision with which they perform their task. If 10 bad flight plans get through, The Pit is having a bad day. On a normal day, all 2,500 flight plans are correct.
