Between sky and strain: inside the world of Air Traffic Controllers

Design
Air
Civil Aviation

Type Insight
Published 18 June 2025

When we talk about civil aviation, we tend to think of pilots, planes and passengers. But there's one voice we rarely hear — yet it's vital to every single flight: the air traffic controller. From a tower or a control centre, they coordinate the invisible ballet of aircraft in the sky. Their mission? Safety first, but also precision, reactivity, and absolute calm — even under pressure.

Inside the mind of a sky guardian

Headset on, eyes locked on the monitors — the air traffic controller has one priority: make sure no aircraft crosses another’s path. And the weight of that responsibility is constant. They anticipate, adjust, and coordinate — ensuring safety above all, to prevent collisions and avoid industrial-scale incidents.

They calculate, adapt, and handle the unexpected. They keep traffic flowing smoothly in a complex, high-pressure environment — where error simply isn’t an option.

Between airspace and bottom lines, pilots chase punctuality, often under pressure from airlines. Stack up too many delays, and carriers lose priority access to high-demand landing and departure slots.

An airline must make sufficient use of its time slots (typically 80% usage over six months). Otherwise, it risks losing the slot, which will be allocated to another airline.

Controllers, meanwhile, hold the line between operational efficiency and uncompromising safety. Every decision has business impacts: delays that ripple through the network, passengers disembarked far from the terminal, last-minute bus transfers adding costs and degrading the passenger experience.

The controller must stay composed, make sharp calls — fast — always with rigour and precision.

Operator in a control center © Julien Lutt / CAPA Pictures
Air traffic management © Thales
Visualization of air traffic management © Julien Lutt / CAPA Pictures

En-route, approach, tower: one goal, constant safety under pressure

There are three main types of controllers:

En-route: monitoring high-altitude flights across thousands of kilometers
Approach: managing descents, velocity, headings, levels
Tower: handling takeoffs and landings

Each role has its specifics, but all require one thing: total mastery of local airspace knowledge to maintain clear, fast decisions under pressure. A controller in Brest can’t just switch to Paris — new airways, new procedures, new mental maps need to be learned.

On a Paris–Melbourne flight, dozens of controllers take turns on the radio across time zones — air traffic control never stops. Over the Pacific, where radio signals can’t reach, communication shifts to text — the equivalent of SMS at 10,000 meters.

As planes near the airport, things get tighter. Airspace gets dense, timing gets critical. Aircraft must be perfectly sequenced, one after another — like a train — or held in airborne “stacks,” burning fuel that’s anything but infinite, and definitely not an eco-responsible pratice.

It’s often at this stage that everything hangs in the balance: weather changes, medical emergencies, last-minute deviations. Controllers must re-sequence arrivals, adjust priorities, send updated instructions — sometimes in a matter of seconds. Radio exchanges become lightning-fast. Every word matters. Every mistake costs fuel and time — or worse.

A job going digital — without losing its edge

Reliability for fast, confident actions

For a long time, instructions were given by voice, with notes scribbled on paper. Each controller had to retain hundreds of pieces of information every minute. A fragile system — vulnerable to forgetfulness or miscommunication between pilot and tower.

Today, with solutions like TopSky (Thales' air traffic management solution; approach, en-route and tour), the profession is evolving and becoming more digital. Instructions are entered, logged, and shared in real time. Alerts flag deviations and potential errors — helping prevent the irreparable.

The result: improved situational awareness, lower cognitive load, stronger decision-making, and reinforced safety.

Controllers as co-creators of the tools they use

This transformation doesn’t happen without them. Every interface, every visual cue, every interaction is designed, tested, and validated with controllers. They help design the product, calibrate workflows, and shape trainings. At Thales, it’s their needs, habits, behaviors and frontline experience that guide Product Design.

Rethinking and optimizing air traffic control operations through digitalization requires careful change management to support the shift toward safer, more advanced practices. It’s a meticulous, end-to-end co-creation process — where nothing is left to chance. The voice of air traffic controllers is essential — not just in the headset, but in shaping the systems and environments of tomorrow.

The controller’s experience: clarity, focus, and efficiency

Designing for them means designing for safety

When we design for air traffic controllers, we’re not just designing an interface — we’re crafting user experiences built for critical systems.

A work environment designed for heightened vigilance: to anticipate, to reduce cognitive load, to alert, and to adapt.
A system fine-tuned for operational efficiency. The goal: optimise operator tasks by minimising the number of required interactions for task execution, and accelerating workflows — with a sharp focus on reinforced readability, usability, and visual contrast. Every second matters — and the more time a controller spends inputting data, the less time they spend monitoring the traffic.
Align the system with the way they think, speak, and decide — enabling action that feels natural, confident, and fast.

The air traffic controller is the invisible guardian of our skies — a mind of sharp discernment, constant vigilance, and steady reactivity. Designing for critical systems means designing for humans in their most constrained and demanding contexts — where every second counts, and every decision must be controlled, calibrated, and risk-aware.