Air Traffic Simulation Design ideas

Question

What things would you consider “a must” if you had to design an ATC Simulation?

I’d come up with:

• Scenario properties (location of runaways, obstacles,etc)
• Aircrafts (operating limits, heading, fuel, altitude, speed, name…)
• Aircraft AI (ability for the ‘pilots’ to obey your instructions with precision)
• Weather (windspeed, visibility, clouds?, temperature?
• …?

Anything else you can come up with? If this turns to be a long list, we can always turn it into a community wiki.

Answer 1

Must have:

• realistic aircraft callsigns eg KL645 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICAO_airline_designator#ICAO_airline_designator
• realistic airport and route points (ICAO routes, eg WSSS REDIX SJ WSSL) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Civil_Aviation_Organization_airport_code

Things to consider:

• geographic information about routes, airways, airspace sectors, uncontrolled airspace
• hand-off of aircraft control between ATC Centers
• simulation of aircraft emergency, eg. hijack, engine failure, etc
• radar coverage and different types of surveillance

Answer 2

• Catastrophes. Volcanoes, you know ;)
• Animations
• consider sophisticated voice control for realism

Answer 3

Nearly everything listed here can be found in Tracon I/II. These were DOS ATC simulators although I recall a Win3.X version of Tracon II. You might be able to find an abandon-ware copy these days as they are 20 years old now.

These games include audible responses from pilots and the second one even did speech recognition which was very impressive for the early 90's.