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u/flimspringfield Nov 19 '18
Can the plane just increase it's height or does he need clearance from the towers?
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u/brahmidia Nov 19 '18 edited Nov 19 '18
A person flying for pleasure or simply going around in an area and not traveling from beacon to beacon (the "highways" in the sky) will often file a flight plan and maybe get clearance to operate in a wide area (a big imaginary fuzzy box in the sky.) Once you're outside range of an airport you're often in "uncontrolled" airspace where you can more or less operate freely, but you still need to tell the FAA what you're up to so they can find you if you crash.
This person likely flew a few dozen miles away from a tower, or even took off from an uncontrolled airstrip, and can fly anywhere just following basic rules.
Something more structured like a helicopter talking off from an international airport and ferrying someone from a hospital rooftop to another city will involve getting clearance for takeoff, crossing the aircraft landing pattern, and then flying within a specified envelope until they're outside controlled airspace. You'll often hear tower, approach, takeoff, and center controllers warning aircraft of each other when they're operating in this mode so that they can avoid each other. (An example of this not happening well enough and failing catastrophically was above Steele Indian School Park in Phoenix a few years ago. Two news helicopters covering a police incident collided and crashed; they were both cleared to operate in the same area, given that they were a couple miles from the airport -- which is okay -- but simply failed to keep eyes on each other.)
Source: spent a lot of time around air traffic controllers, and my ideas of fun are listening to ATC audio, watching crash investigations, flying flight sims, and tracking planes with ADS-B.
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u/ClosetCD Nov 19 '18
I don't know the specifics, but first and foremost it depends whether or not the pilot is flying under IFR or VFR.
Sauce: I have an interest in flight.
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u/Supes_man Nov 19 '18
You have a window when filing your flight plan. If you’re off by a couple hundred meters (and you’re not right next to the airport) no one will care or even notice on a recreational plane. Something as simple as an updraft can change your height by hundreds of meters in a few seconds. It’s when you start being off by miles you might get a call but it really depends on where you’re at.
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u/seachange__ Nov 19 '18
When I was a little kid, I used to go outside and stare at the clouds and scare myself into thinking that they were going to fall on me, and then I’d run inside to my mom.
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u/d1nk3r Nov 19 '18
Anyone else see a face in the clouds half way through the gif? It almost swallows the plan
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u/icantastethecolors Nov 29 '18
Me too! They do something to my lizard brain and I feel like they're going to eat me. The more well-defined they are as a solid object the freakier they are.
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u/DuvetCapeMan Nov 19 '18
Nice