Visiting Stansted ATC Tower

So this morning a friend and I headed down to Stansted for a visit to the Air Traffic Control tower. This is my second time visiting the tower and its a great way to spend the morning watching the jets takeoff and land.

A picture taken on my first visit to the tower in April 2016.

We arrived at the entrance gate just before 9am, before being let in to park up ready for our tour. After spending 5 minutes chatting to a young boy and his Mother who were on the tour with us, we entered the building, signed in and made our way up to the 13th floor.

Walking up the final set of stairs to the main control area really does offer some great views of Essex. On my first visit last year the weather was lovely with a few cumulus clouds doted about here and there. This meant that we could actually see London. Unfortunately, the weather today was a lot cloudier so visibility was reduced.

The tour began with a brief description of what each controller does before our guide went into further detail explaining what information is shown in front of them and what aircraft they are responsible for. Today, there were two controllers working, one controlling the aircraft on the runway known as 'Tower' and the other controller was positioning the aircraft on the ground at the correct holding point ready for takeoff, or guiding the planes that had landed to the correct gate. This position is known as 'Ground'.

For instance, an aircraft departing Stansted would initially call 'Ground' for their departure clearance and then Ground control would then direct the aircraft to the correct holding point (depending on which direction the aircraft is departing) at the end of the active runway. Ground control would then instruct the pilots to contact 'Tower' where they would then clear the aircraft onto the runway ready for takeoff. Once airborne, 'Tower' then instructs the pilots to contact London Control which is a centre in Swanwick where the controllers there will take over and guide the aircraft to the correct altitude and airway.

We then went to a little viewing area just below the controllers which offered some great views of the cargo bay area below the tower. For those of you who haven't been to Stansted before it is pretty much Ryanair land. Today, there was the odd easyJet, Thomas Cook and cargo 747 plane parked up, but other than that its all Ryanair, so if you're a Ryanair fan... Stansted is your airport! Other airlines do fly from Stansted such as Thomson, Titan and Jet 2 (as of next month I believe) but our tour was scheduled for a quiet time just after the morning rush so that we didn't interrupt, which meant that it was a quiet time for departures and arrivals.

An easyJet just about to touchdown while a Ryanair 737 waits at the hold ready for departure.

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