Scottish Area Control Centre Oceanic Area Control Centre Military Control Engineering Scottish Area Control Centre Controllers at the Scottish Area Control Centre handle aircraft flying in, geographically, Europe s largest flight information region. Each of the centre s control suites is manned by two controllers a planning controller and an executive or radar controller. They are supported by a flight progress board assistant. The suites house a flight planning board to display the flight progress strips and a radar position containing two radar displays, as well as the necessary radio channel selectors, touch sensitive telephone keypads and visual display units providing a variety of operational information including weather conditions. Fact File SACC has 12 civil control suites.
Controllers use high definition radar displays.
The centre covers an area of over 190,000 square miles. As radar only has a range of some 200 miles controllers in the Oceanic Area Control Centre use position reports and estimates passed from pilots to ensure aircraft are safely separated. This information is provided using high frequency radio and is transmitted and received via a radio communications station at Ballygireen, near Shannon in Ireland. Due to passenger demands, time zone differences and airport noise restrictions, much of the North Atlantic traffic is concentrated at particular times - westbound in the late morning and afternoon and east bound during the night and early morning. Because of this and the limited height band for economical jet operations the airspace is comparatively congested.