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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

For beginners a recommendation is to (a) switch to a lower-activity airport, and (b) go through the tutorial, which is actually very well integrated with the gameplay.

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Thanks! I'm still going through the tutorial, but this looks neat! I love ATC games.

There are some other fun ones out there, like ATC-Manager-2 (https://github.com/sempostma/atc-manager-2) and BSD's atc (https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=atc). On Android, I've had fun memories playing Endless ATC and Unmatched Air Traffic Control. One thing I've noticed about these ATC games is that they tend to be more radar-based than ground-based. I kinda made an attempt to create a ground-based ATC last year - https://github.com/pncnmnp/roger.

Also, tangentially, a few months back, I was browsing my local bookstore when I came across a poster on "Navitrainer" - this was a flight simulator from the forties - https://pncnmnp.github.io/blogs/navitrainer.html - fascinating stuff!

Another fun experience: X-plane + VATSIM. Decent quality flight sim plus community of real-time simulated air traffic controllers.

To clarify here, the VATSIM controllers are real humans. The traffic is simulated, but also “real”, in that it’s human sim pilots flying “on network.” And the network is sim-agnostic. I’m still working on being good enough with my plane in MSFS to be able to fly online.

Yes, the idea of VATSIM is "There are people who want to play pilot simulators and there are people who want to play ATC simulators. What if there was a network protocol to link those groups together?"

There's a Japanese ATC sim series called "I Am an Air Traffic Controller" that I like. It's got a couple installments on the Switch and 3DS which is where I played them, but they go back as far as the PS1. Some but not all of them were localized (there is an English one on Switch)

I think originally it was a PC game series, I've watched some videos of the recent PC installments and they look TOUGH. Much tougher than the console ones

Wow, BSD's atc was a neat way of discretising what's usually a continuous experience. Good to remember!

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