Name: The Gruelling Process To Become An Air Traffic Controller | Skies Above Britain | Full Episode
Uploaded: 2026-03-14T15:41:41.000Z
Duration: 55 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

London, one of the busiest cities on earth and a magnet for business and tourism.

It pulls three and a half thousand planes a day into its five major airports, all bursting at the seams.

Orchestrating this daily rush is the job of NATS Swanwick, the UK's air traffic control hub.

Here controllers cram the growing number of flights into Southeast England's limited airspace.

We are a small island and we have five major airfields right in one little corner.

It's a lot of planes to get into a very small space with limited amounts of tarmac.

303, contact London with delegate 135 decimal 85.

Adding to today's workload, cloud bursts of heavy rain.

What's the weather looking like out your window then?

Heathrow has just gone into Phys2 Holdings.

Yeah, because the weather has now got to Heathrow and the rain has got to Heathrow and we've had to increase the spacing for all arrivals because the tower having difficulty seeing parts of the Runway.

And so part of the procedure is before you get into really low visibility.

We've just gone in VIS2, which gives us a minimum four mile spacing.

We just need to be aware of Dartmouth movements on the ground.

Increasing the distance between aircraft from 3 miles to 4 has a domino effect, slowing traffic at other airports.

Even if there's no local rain, that'll drop over, won't it?

Because of the weather that we've had in the airspace, we've had to restrict the departures and so the knock on effect of all of this is that actually they're close to running out of stands at Gatwick.

Now the space on the ground, the tarmac is becoming full.

So they know they're not going to get 16 for at least an hour and a half.

All right, Terminal control, Lonnie speaking.

To prevent a jam on the ground, Steve cuts the number of planes allowed into gatwick's airspace from 27 an hour to 16.

Battening down the hatches now until we can get through to the handover.

The weather should be through just after the handover, so fingers crossed, my colleague and his team will have a lovely afternoon while we go and have my cup of tea.

From 8 o' clock this morning, it's the job with the highest pressure at nats, keeping everyone safe entering or leaving London's Airspace, one of the busiest patches of sky in the world.

Planes are threaded through a spaghetti junction of invisible highways into stacks above the five main airports manned by up to five controllers.

The biggest, Heathrow, has four stacks, each filled with up to 10 circling planes, all carrying an average of 200 passengers.

This can put up to 4,000 people in the hands of just one controller.

Sometimes your heart's racing a bit redder than you would normally be.

But the second you start thinking of each of those aircraft as hundreds of people, which then adds up to thousands of people you're keeping safe and alive.

Ultimately I think you just lose the plot, you go crazy.

It's little wonder the path to becoming a controller is so tough.

Each year just half a percent of the thousands who apply are accepted.

Making getting into NATS harder than winning a place at Oxford or Cambridge.

Today, after passing a series of aptitude tests, five applicants have arrived to start the three year course.

This is our aerodrome simulator, which is fab.

23 year old Tom Finch recently graduated with a maths degree.

It's huge and ridiculous and really like amazing, the whole building.

If you just want to introduce yourself to me and maybe something interesting about yourself.

I'm Tom, I'm from Warrington in the northwest and I've cycled from Land's End to John o' Groats for charity and from Warrington to Paris as I graduated.

I applied for this because I saw him at a careers fair.

I was just working at my local McDonald's, just trying to earn some money while I waited.

I mean I don't really have like an aviation background.

I used to do road cycling quite often I haven't for a while because injury from skateboarding.

20 year old Tim Christoph gave up his place at university and has left home for the first time to be here.

When my mum heard I got the job she just sort of screamed and then hugged me.

She was like sad that I'm leaving home because I've never moved away before and now it's like moving away for good.

You've probably heard it from all sorts of people.

There is a tremendous amount of study and the first four weeks is quite tough.

After a month of basic training, they'll be plunged into a series of tests, fail anyone, and it's off the course.

It is the level of study, the complexity of what they study that puts a lot of pressure on them.

From the point they leave here, which hopefully been nine months time, they'll actually start working with live traffic.

But with a valid controller by their side, it's massive.

Historically had one guy that was doing fabulously well and he came in one day and said I can't take the responsibility and withdrew from the course.

Pressure on Gnats is partly the result of an explosion in budget airlines.

20 years ago they carried around 5 million passengers a year.

Now they fly well over 16 times that number.

Today Fergus Rack, a pilot for low cost Norwegian Airlines is scheduled to make two round trips to Europe in his Boeing 737.

We're flying a low cost airline and the aircraft needs to be in the air for the longest possible time.

So the name of the game for us is to be very efficient, all working very solidly.

We're going to try and aim to leave here at five past eight.

So you can start your briefing now if you like.

Between flights, the cabin crew clean the passenger compartment while Fergus does standard safety checks, checking that everything is where it should be, making sure that there's no hydraulic leaks, no fuel leaks.

I'm also doing a security check at the same time the stairways and bombs and devices that may have been, that may have been set on board the airplane.

During the 30 minute turnaround, 26,000 liters of kerosene is pumped into the wings While up to 227 liters of waste is sucked out of the tanks.

And before taking off, 125 safety checks are ticked off.

We're just finishing off our last bits of paperwork and we can get ourselves underway for Berlin Schne.

I've asked them to request that the fueler comes out immediately.

If you can avoid having to do monitored fueling, yeah, that will help.

The stubby shaped 737 affectionately known as the Pig, is the best selling civil aircraft ever built.

Somewhere in the world, one takes off every five seconds and Fergus is flying one of the latest.

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The Gruelling Process To Become An Air Traffic Controller | Skies Above Britain | Full Episode

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