Air Traffic Management Overview

The Air Traffic Control (ATC) system manages air traffic from various sources throughout the United States National Airspace System (NAS). The mission of air traffic control is to promote the safe, orderly, and expeditious movement of aircraft. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is responsible for providing the NAS infrastructure to enable air operations in the United States, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Air traffic control, the primary component of the NAS architecture, is a complex system comprising of many types of facilities, a plethora of hardware and software systems, and complicated interactions between humans and machines. There are two goals that must be met by the Air Traffic Control system: safety and efficiency. To ensure safety, minimum separation must be maintained between aircraft as they pass through the national airspace. Efficient air traffic control, however, requires that separation not be so great as to adversely affect the flow of traffic through the airspace. This document provides a summary of the air traffic management system together with pointers to other sources of more detailed information.