Air Traffic Controller
(Airport Hero) Review

Air Traffic Controller (Airport Hero) (1998) is a series of games where you take charge of an airport. You deal with landing planes, directing them to runways and gates while ensuring things run on time and without accidents. Each session is a unique set of inbound and outbound flights, your job is to run this smoothly within the limitations of traffic control.

Play involves making decisions about how planes are allowed to land at your airport. You choose which runway is best based on wind direction, terminal, other air traffic and the business of the airport. You also need to manage planes on the ground to taxi them to the runways for takeoff, or to the gate to disembark.

It's both complicated and slow. On the earlier games (like the 3DS versions) you can't speed up the time between decisions that means you are often waiting for planes to arrive before the next decision is required. However, this quirky commitment to realism is part of the charm.

You are limited in how you can view proceedings and must often make decisions (when they arrive) with minimal time and information. As you do this you learn about the various stages a plane goes through from first entering airspace, being guided in by the tower, negotiating land and then taxiing to the gate.

As you progress you are faced with busier airports and different times of day. Unexpected events, like emergency landings or change of wind direction, raise the stakes further. You can have everything all perfectly balanced and then find a plane has a failed take off and you need to quickly reorganising the other air traffic.

The game started on PC with four versions spanning 1998 to 2020, originally called Air Traffic Controller but latest version named I am an Air Traffic Controller 4. It also became popular on PlayStation Portable, Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS and 3DS:

• Airport Hero (2006) PSP
• Air Traffic Chaos (2007) Nintendo DS
• Airport Hero 3D (2012) Nintendo 3DS with versions for Honolulu, Narita, Naha Premium and Osaka KIX
• Airport Hero 3D All Stars (2015) Nintendo 3DS with versions for Narita, Haneda and Kansai Airports

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Air Traffic Controller (Airport Hero) 21 months ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 21 months ago.