Air Traffic Control in Microsoft Flight Simulator

Video Transcript

"DIXON GILLETTE: Welcome back to Expert Village, my name is Dixon Gillette and let's continue our tutorial on Microsoft Flight Simulator X. All right, let's talk a little bit about ATC procedures or air traffic control. You're going to be using your radios to communicate with the tower and other aircraft to provide safe and efficient operations on the ground at an airport while you're en route to your destination and finally when you get to your destination. The first thing that we're going to do here is we're going to listen to flagstaff's ATIS system or air terminal information service. And as you see here, a little scroll marquee starts to come at the top here. And that's going to tell us information about the winds, the weather conditions, the active runways in use, any advisories that we need to know. And finally, it's going to give you an ending call sign that has to do with the phonetic alphabet. Now, essentially, what you're going to do is you're going to take this ATIS information and we're going to contact the control for the ground and this is called ground control. Now, essentially, what we're doing is we're contacting the controller here and we're saying where we're at, what we're doing, what our destination is and, finally, can we go. We also give that last phonetic letter to identify the tower and let him or her know that we have the latest weather information provided on ATIS. You don't have to do this. But if you were in a real world situation, that basically saves the controller from going over all these information with you again."