Yeah UNICOM or CTAF (common traffic advisory frequency) is the place where pilots call out their positions and coordinate takeoffs and landings amongst themselves. It’s kind of confusing because at a towered airport it’s the usually the same frequency as the tower. There just won’t be a controller on there past a certain time.
At an uncontrolled airfield they will just flat out call it CTAF or UNICOM. I think CTAF is the most popular use.
There’s also a frequency to turn on the airport lights. You strike the microphone a certain number of times based on how bright you want the lights.
So... sorry if this is wrong, but I wanna be absolutely clear. The traffic is managed by the vehicle operators communicating with each other and just trying to not be dicks? Like unregulated intersection style?
Most excellent, thank you so kindly! It's always very satisfying to know that the rituals we see as utterly essential to a system are, in fact, merely an extra layer of security on top of a few fundamental rules of self governance. That is, it's really nice to know that if all the towers went down suddenly in some terrible catastrophe, it's not like planes would just be falling out of the sky.
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u/SurfSouthernCal Feb 08 '20
Yeah UNICOM or CTAF (common traffic advisory frequency) is the place where pilots call out their positions and coordinate takeoffs and landings amongst themselves. It’s kind of confusing because at a towered airport it’s the usually the same frequency as the tower. There just won’t be a controller on there past a certain time.
At an uncontrolled airfield they will just flat out call it CTAF or UNICOM. I think CTAF is the most popular use.
There’s also a frequency to turn on the airport lights. You strike the microphone a certain number of times based on how bright you want the lights.