OpenTube

Real Controller FAILS ATC Game - Vectors #firstlook

Leonidas Ares

22,908 views

Watch as I, a real life air traffic controller, fail at a new ATC game: Vectors. In this video, I playthrough and demo the free browser game Vectors and give my take on it.

I then switch to hard mode and proceed to get my face pushed in. Come along and watch it all unravel before your eyes.

Other ATC games create difficulty just by throwing a lot of planes at you. Vectors overwhelms you at the core of what it means to be an air traffic controller: scanning the control environment, good control judgement, priority of duties, and effective flow of air traffic. Oh, and then sprinkle in emergencies, thunderstorms, and runway inspections.

No need to download or sign up. Find Vectors at https://vectorsatc.com

Support the developer: https://ko-fi.com/meghneel

Join my discord for video release notifications: Discord: discord

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0:00 - Intro
3:00 - User interface
6:42 - Game start
30:00 - End of shift
31:43 - Hard mode
52:42 - Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!
56:46 - End of shift
57:57 - Fin
58:11 KOFI LINK CARD
59:47 - Outro

#vectorsatc #airtrafficcontrol #atcgame #browsergames #indiegames #gaming

9 Comments

@leonidasares Creator 1 day ago Pinned

Play Vectors free in your browser: https://vectorsatc.com/

@meghneel 4 days ago

Developer here: thank you so much for playing, Leonidas! Watching a real controller work through it taught me more than weeks of testing. Your feedback is already in the game: J-rings for separation, Radar Maintenance widening them, C/D for climb and descend, and a new low-visibility mode where arrivals fly real final approach fixes like BENPA and AXMUL. And yes, you can study the final scene soon too.

@RobotPanda15 1 day ago

What a crazy algorithm pull. This looks really interesting

@Angel33Demon666 13 hours ago

This looks kind of like the game ATC traffic: greenlight

@1over137 5 hours ago

Actual Heathrow practices. For the westerlys you will have your arrivals flow to A for North and E for south and HOLD. As new arrivals appear, you assign them a descent to the "top of stack" and leave them to HOLD on reaching. Then, alternatively the director accepts flights leaving A or E (I can't recall the VOR names), descending them down and turning them onto an intercept for the ILS. One runway is landing, one is departing, not usually mixed. There are published transition proceedures online you can use as a guide, if you vector them along those parameters it will be smooth continuous descent to landing. All you have to do is manage the stacks, descend people into them to free up levels in it. In the real world this process is split across at least 4 positions. 6 or 8 I believe is possible for heavy loads.

@1over137 5 hours ago

If it were realistic, arrivals would be cleared to altitude above the departures initial climb altitude. Heathrow/Gatwick are like this. Departures are held low until they have space to climb through the arrivals. It also means if you don't give anyone any instructions, they all just flow unconflicted to their clearance points and hold for arrivals and the climb steps on the SID for departures. All you as controller are doing is finding space to climb the departures early and sequencing the arrivals from their STAR fix to the approach path and altitude. "London Control" got this right.

@1over137 5 hours ago

The position is insane. Its North and South radar, plus approach director, plus tower. That a lot of load for one controller. I notice the "Flight strips" don't follow any real world sense. There should be an "Inbox" a "Working" and a "Outbox" where you resectively accept (or modify) incoming flight strips from the last sector alone, they state the hand off parameters. They will have "Standing agreements" but if you want a flight to arrive with other parameters you can negotiate the strip with the sector before accepting it. Time permitting. On the other end, you "offer" things out of your Working slots into the Outbox and the next controller along accepts or negotiates it. So if you can't quite get someone onto the agreed heading and altitude, you can offer them at a lower alt the the next guy has no choice really. It does give him warning though.