What happens when you press play
You take a real position at a real airport and aircraft start calling you. A card sits at the bottom of the scope and walks you through the first arrival, from its check-in to the moment you hand it off.
It advances on what you do, never on a timer. Descend the aircraft and the lesson moves to the turn; it will sit and wait until you do. Work a departure in the middle of it and nothing breaks, the card acknowledges it and keeps your arrival where it was.
What the first session teaches
- Read the board. Every strip on the right is an aircraft on your frequency.
- See how the shift is being scored. You chose that before taking the position, and the debrief repeats it.
- Open an aircraft. Click it on the scope or on its strip and its command menu appears.
- Give it an altitude, and hear the pilot read the clearance back.
- Turn it toward the dashed centerline, by dragging the blip, choosing a heading, or tapping a waypoint on touch.
- Switch to the approach view, line it up on the runway heading, bring it down, and clear it to land.
- Ship it on once it is down. One key hands the aircraft to the next controller and completes the arrival.
- Learn the alarm ladder. Amber gives you time to solve a projected conflict; red means separation is already gone.
- Learn who has to listen. Published airspace decides it: a VFR outside the Class B flies its own navigation and answers “unable, VFR”.
- Pick up the controls that keep a busy scope readable before traffic gets away from you.
- You have the position.
Which seat you are working
A real facility splits the job between people. Most of ours do not: you work TOWER + APPROACH, the runway and the radar at once, which is one person doing what a busy field gives to several. That is the default, it is what every scored shift uses, and it is the job the lesson above teaches.
At eighty of our airports you can instead take APPROACH ONLY: the radar half only, with tower worked by somebody else. Departures reach you already airborne instead of asking you for a takeoff clearance, and arrivals leave you on final when you hand them to tower rather than staying with you to touchdown. It changes what your job is rather than how hard it is, so it is available in Sandbox and not in scored shifts, where mixing the two would rank different jobs against each other.
You pick it on the briefing screen before taking the position, under Work the position. Fields without approach control do not offer it, because that seat does not exist there.
You are never stuck in it
SKIP TUTORIAL is on screen the whole time. Take it whenever you want and the session carries on without the coaching. If you skip it and wish you had not, Replay tutorial in the help panel brings it back for the next session.
It appears once, on a first session. Loading a shared or seeded session does not start it, because somebody handing you a specific piece of traffic is not a first session.
What you need
A browser. There is nothing to download, no account to make, no plugin and no payment. Keyboard and mouse work, and so does touch: every command in the lesson can be issued from the menu without typing a character.
When you want the rest of it, the command reference
is the same one the in-game help panel is built from, and you can press
? for it at any time without leaving the position.
What this is not
This is not controller training and it does not qualify you for anything. Real certification is a job, taught by an academy and a facility, and nothing in a browser substitutes for it. What this is: procedures, phraseology and separation taken from published FAA data, close enough that the habits you build here are the real ones rather than a game's invention. Where we depart from the real thing, the fidelity ledger says so and says why.
Where to start
Any field works for a first shift, and the quieter ones give you more room to think. Browse every airport to see which are steady and which are busy, or just take a position and let the lesson find you.