On May 5th, I visited Helsinki-Vantaa’s air traffic control facilities, a visit organized by SVIL.

We were given a short presentation about how air traffic control works at Helsinki-Vantaa. After the presentation we first visited the radar control room and then in the control tower.

Views from the radar control room. The current Eurocat radar system has been in use since 2000 and is planned to have an update in the near future.

Some additional tools used by air traffic controllers. From the top: ground radar, maestro(system used to calculate traffic flows) and WODA (displays current weather, ATIS and runway usage etc.)

Views from the control tower. Actual tower positions are at lower level and upper level has the ground and clearance delivery positions.

And lastly, a view towards the non-schengen terminal Finnair’s heavy birds waiting to depart to Mumbai, Bangkok and Beijing. As you can see there’s huge construction going on.

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