Airport Control – Draw the Flight Path

How to play Airport Control

You are in the control tower of a small, very busy airfield. Aircraft appear at the edge of the map one after another: red planes belong on the red runway, blue planes on the blue runway and yellow helicopters on the helipad. Your only tool is your finger (or mouse). Draw the flight path and the aircraft follows it to the ground. Land as many as you can, because the first mid-air collision ends your shift.

1. Watch the flashing arrows at the edge: they show where the next aircraft will appear and what colour it is.
2. Press on an aircraft and drag a line to the matching runway threshold or helipad. The path turns solid when it locks on.
3. The aircraft follows your line, touches down and rolls along the runway. Each landing scores one point.
4. If a red warning ring flashes, two aircraft are too close. Redraw one of the paths to separate them.
5. Arrivals get faster and more frequent as your score climbs. How long can you keep the sky safe?

Tips from the tower

• Land the closest aircraft first. A plane that is near its runway lands quickly and leaves the airspace, which frees room for everything else.
• Use wide curves for slow helicopters. Helicopters are the slowest aircraft, so a fast jet behind one will catch up. Keep their paths away from the busy runway approaches.
• Create lanes. Bring red planes in from one side of the map and blue planes from the other, so their paths never cross. Consistent routes are much easier to keep track of when the screen fills up.
• Don’t forget the wanderers. An aircraft without a path bounces around the edges. Give every new arrival a path as soon as it appears, even a rough one, and fine-tune it later.
• Redraw early, not late. Two paths that cross are fine if the aircraft reach the crossing at different times. When in doubt, add a small detour to one of them.

Aircraft, runways and scoring

There are three kinds of aircraft. Jets are the fastest and have swept-back wings,propeller planes are a little slower and helicopters hover along slowly with a spinning rotor. Red and blue aircraft need a runway: draw your path to the striped threshold at the start of the runway and the plane touches down and rolls to a stop. Yellow helicopters land on the round helipad marked H. Helicopters only start arriving once you have landed a few planes, so the first minute is a gentle warm-up. Every successful landing adds one point. As the score rises, new arrivals come in more often and fly a little faster.

A pocket air traffic control game

Line-drawing flight games became a classic on touch screens because the controls are so natural: you simply point where the plane should go. Behind that simple input is a real juggling act. Every aircraft moves on its own and at its own speed, and you have to keep a mental picture of where each one will be a few seconds from now. That is very close to what real air traffic controllers do when they keep aircraft separated, though they use radar, radio and strict procedures rather than a crayon. Airport Control is a short, intense version of that challenge: a few minutes of calm that slowly turns into organised chaos.

It is a great game for practising divided attention and quick decision making. Short rounds make it easy to have "just one more go", and because your best score is saved you always have a target to beat.

More drawing games

Prefer to plan without a timer ticking? In Parking Path you draw routes for a car park full of cars and watch them drive at the same time. For a physics challenge, tryDraw Puzzle, and for a quick test of hand control see how round you can draw inDraw a Perfect Circle.