Identifying Career Goal and How to Get There Research

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Air traffic control is one of the jobs that requires razor sharp precision and reactions. As such, it is also considered to be one of the most stressful jobs relative to the fact that is has a very delicate balance between life and death elements. Air controllers are faced with quite a number of challenges that now range from weather changes to terrorism. Technology plays a very subtle role in the air control as a way of further enhancing the intrinsic skills that the air controllers are supposed to have and apply. Each hour thousands of flight plans interact, with thousands of people in the air at the mercy of the air traffic controllers (Collegegrad.com). While the bottom line of the traffic control decisions rests on the abilities of the air controllers, the technology used at the air traffic control towers also plays a crucial role. At the moment technology plays the vital role of availing the right information about the flight pans and other important packets to help the air traffic controllers to make informed decisions, with razor-sharp precision and in some of the cases in split seconds to save lives.
Ordinarily an air traffic controller will receive information from more than 20 traffic management systems, from which they have to synthesize the information and come up with traffic schedules for each of the flights. The flights plans have to be filed before the take-off with specific information about the flight such as altitude, direction and speed among others, to help the passengers get from point to A to B safely. Air traffic controllers rely on technology to communicate with the flight crew, relative to the flow of information from the IT systems (Faa.gov). The basic roles that technology plays in air traffic control relates to separation, weather and flight information, navigation aid, traffic management processing and landing. Systems such as surveillance radars are crucial in determining the bearing and the range as well as information such as altitude and identity of the aircraft. Airborne transponders help in tracking the aircrafts and for planes that fly above the 12,500 feet altitude, they have to have a transponder that is capable of reporting the plane’s altitude and the identification code (ComputerWeekly). Navigation aids on the other hand tend to have very high frequency omnidirectional range system which operate within the VHF band right below the frequencies that are used by the voice communications (Collegegrad.com). At the moment computers also plays a major role processing the flight plans, correlating the transponder returns, filtering out extraneous signals generate displays on the consoles that controllers use and ...