My dad was an air traffic controller for the Air Force in the late 1960s. He’s been getting into his new notebook computer, and I’ve often thought about getting him some kind of air traffic control simulation or training software to play with. But the stuff I looked at seemed pretty hard core and modern, for folks seriously interested in becoming an ATC in their future career, not reminiscing about 40 years ago.
Is there such a thing, or do any ATC simulation programs have simpler settings that would be as good for these purposes?
BTW, I don’t know the first thing about air traffic control, other that my dad worked in it and still talks about it sometimes.
There was an old game from the ‘80s called TRACON, put out by Wesson, which simulated aircraft traffic control in a TRACON, the centers that control airspace below 12,000’ around major airports. You could simulate LA, Miami, Seattle, San Francisco and Chicago, IIRC., and you could pretty easily construct new simulation scenarios. It was quite realistic (it was cobbled together from that company’s actual simulation software, used by the FAA).
It doesn’t run on the more recent versions of Windows, though. I still have my copy, and haven’t bothered to figure out how to get it up and running under a DOS emulator, but that should work, I expect…