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Originally Posted by August123
Great thread and thanks for taking the time WOXOF.
I'm an avid fisherman, spend many evenings drifting Boston Harbor opposite Logan. The thing that always amazes me is the sheer volume of landings happening at peak times. From jumbo intl's flights to the pesky little go-carts with wings (showing my ignorance of aviation, I know), one after another, every 15-20 seconds it seems, a plane lands.
How dangerous is this scenario?
Good questions August. Not dangerous at all. It's a well choreographed flow of aircraft using feeder fixes and standard separation criteria.
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Does each plane have a dedicated air traffic controller?
No. A busy airport will have one and often two approach control sectors (north and south, or east and west) whose controller is responsible for metering the flow of traffic onto final approach for the active runway and turning the plane over to the tower (local control) for landing clearance. During very high volume, there may be additional layers of approach control. Coming into JFK during rush hour, the first approach controller takes us from Eastern Long Island in to about Islip and then turns us over to "Final", the last approach controller for traffic arriving from the East.
If the volume gets too great, they may refuse more traffic resulting in airborne holding at fixes outside the approach sector. It may also result in a ground stop for any traffic about to take off for that airport and the ground stop will remain in effect until they get a handle on the volume of traffic.
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What is protocol on which plane has right of way?
It's pretty much "first come, first served" with ATC. A 747 does not get priority over regional jet, even though it may be carrying 6 times as many people.
In fact, I remember years ago coming in to Dulles to land in a small single engine plane and the Concorde was told by tower to hold short of the runway for landing traffic: me! That plane was burning more fuel in the minutes it had to hold short than my plane would have used to fly to Texas. I even offered to the tower to do a left 360 degree turn so that the Concorde could depart. "Negative" he said, "cleared to land". The controllers have no incentive to minimize unnecessary fuel burn.
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Often times in these situations of heavy volume, looking east you can see planes stacked for miles waiting for final approach, at varying altitudes. If something happens on the ground which closes runways, what happens?
At night the line of aircraft lined up can be seen for 20+ miles and is a pretty sight. If the runway closes (e.g. a departing aircraft blows a tire and leave debris on the runway), it can create short term chaos as the landing aircraft all have to be vectored to holding patterns, if there was only one landing runway, or to the stream for the other runway. This can easily create lots of delays down the line and result in airborne holding for aircraft still hundreds of miles away.
BTW, VIP movement, like the President coming into NY, causes the same thing. They stop all takeoffs and landings when he's anywhere in the vicinity.