Play freeBe the air traffic controller. Use your voice to guide arriving planes safely down to the runway — one crowded radar screen, a dozen pilots, and nobody up there can see each other.
No aviation experience neededKeyboard works tooFree in your browser
Airliners arrive in your airspace high, fast, and pointed away from the runway. The pilots cannot see each other. You have a radar screen, one radio frequency, and about thirty miles of sky.
Your job is to turn, descend and slow each arrival until it can lock onto the ILS — the pair of radio beams that guide it to runway 27 — then hand it to Tower. The beams only work from a narrow window: roughly 10 to 14 miles out, within 30° of the runway heading, and below the glidepath. Everything you do exists to put aircraft inside that window, in single file, correctly spaced.
You do it by talking. Hold the radio key, say the clearance, and the crew reads it back and flies it.
Hold the radio key and say it: “Speedbird 214, turn right heading 240.” Natural phrasing works — “slow to 180”, “bring it down to 3000”, and “steer 240” all resolve correctly. Every instruction is read back in the crew’s own voice.
Each flight carries its own voice, accent, experience and assertiveness. Workload, delay and fuel change how they sound and what they ask for. Leave an aircraft unattended and it will chase you — politely first, then not.
Localizer and glideslope capture are computed. A clearance issued from the wrong place produces no capture, because the aircraft genuinely was not in the beam. Turn rate, climb rate and acceleration are modelled per type.
Aircraft burn fuel while they wait. Hold one too long and the crew declares minimum fuel, then diverts. Every delay you give one aircraft is paid for by another.
Key up and you step on whoever is transmitting, exactly as on a real VHF radio. Audio is filtered to a radio passband, so the frequency sounds like a frequency.
Traffic is checked continuously against 3 NM and 1,000 feet. Either standard alone is sufficient; breaching both at once is a recorded loss of separation.
Approach control at Mumbai is playable now. Everything else is listed as planned, not shipped.
An air traffic control game puts you in charge of the airspace rather than flying an aircraft. You read a radar display, talk to pilots, and decide where every aircraft goes. In Talk to Tower you issue headings, altitudes, speeds, approach clearances, and handoffs while keeping aircraft separated from each other.
An approach controller owns a volume of airspace roughly 30 to 40 miles around one airport. Arriving aircraft enter that airspace high, fast, and not aligned with the runway. The controller turns, descends, and slows each one until it can intercept the runway ILS beam, arranges the arrivals into one evenly spaced stream, then transfers each aircraft to the Tower controller who issues the landing clearance.
The Instrument Landing System transmits two radio beams from the runway. The localizer indicates whether an aircraft is left or right of the runway centreline. The glideslope, normally angled at 3 degrees, indicates whether the aircraft is above or below the correct descent path. When an aircraft captures both beams, its autopilot follows them down to the runway.
The ILS beams are usable only from a narrow window: approximately 10 to 14 nautical miles from the runway, within about 30 degrees of the runway heading, and below the glideslope. An aircraft arriving too high or crossing the centreline at a steep angle passes through the beam without capturing it. Positioning aircraft inside that window is the controller core task.
A radar scope with the airport at the centre. Each moving symbol is a simulated airliner labelled with its callsign, altitude, and speed. A dashed line extending west of the airport is the ILS approach path for runway 27. You select an aircraft, then talk to it.
No. The guided training shift assumes you know nothing and explains each concept at the moment you first need it. The aviation logic is realistic, but the pacing and feedback are designed for a first-time player.
Yes. Talk to Tower is built around push-to-talk voice clearances and spoken pilot readbacks. Keyboard input is always available, so the complete game works if you would rather not speak or cannot grant microphone permission.
It uses recognizable approach-control procedure: real callsigns, absolute headings, altitude and speed assignments, separation minima, localizer and glideslope capture, and Tower handoffs. Mumbai runway geometry and the ILS procedure are projected from published charts. It is a game and a training aid, not certified software, and is not for operational use.
The web beta is free to start and guest play requires no account. You can optionally create a controller account to keep career progress across supported devices.
The web game runs in modern desktop and mobile browsers, and the desktop version is a wide information-dense console. A dedicated Android build exists, with iOS planned; both use the same voice-first control concept.
Open an issue on the GitHub repository at github.com/aliacollins/talk-to-tower/issues. Bug reports, phraseology corrections from controllers, and airport requests are all welcome.
Built by one person and still changing. Bug reports, phraseology corrections from working controllers, and airport requests are all useful.