Floating above the main screen are several smaller screens that can be moved and resized. The Strip Screen has a space for arrivals and departures. In the real world, when an aircraft is ready to taxi, ATC makes a strip for it which is passed from controller to controller as the plane moves from the gate to the end of the runway and finally to the radar controller. On this printed strip are markings that denote exactly what that aircraft has been cleared to do. As you clear the aircraft along, the strip will start to populate with corresponding markings which are representative of what you would find in an actual tower.
On the DBRITE on the upper left you can see the just departed aircraft appear on the airborne radar display. Tell it to "contact depature" and its no longer your responsibility.
In most towers these days they have a DBRITE screen which is a radar type display to show aircraft movement. For most towers at smaller airports, this screen is a repeater of the airborne radar picture that radar controllers in the radar room . This game also has an airborne radar screen that shows the approach paths and traffic as far as 20 miles away. We will get to that in a minute. The DBRITE screen in this game shows the radar display of all the taxiways and gates which most major airports have due to the complexity of the area, a detailed radar picture is essential. However, in real life the ground control radar it is a separate system than what is used for airborne traffic.
Can you hear me now?
This is where the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the speech recognition features really come into play for those who want to “talk” to the game. Tower! 2011 uses Microsoft’s speck SDK voice recognition technology. One voice from the computer represents all pilots and as each aircraft is ready to taxi it calls you with call-sign and that they are ready to taxi. At that point you issue taxi instructions which can vary from all the way to the runway to just a few intersections along the way based on what other aircraft movement you might have going on.
On the screen the aircraft can bunch up and its hard to read their data tags. On the far upper left the arrival and deaprture lanes are still clear.
I found the speech recognition very good (, and the game recommends you take your time to set up your speech recognition software properly because even after taking a half hour to teach the computer my voice, I still had to speak very precisely with almost perfect diction to get the commands to be accepted as desired.
You will spend a lot of time interacting with the Command Screen. On the top, as you speak in your commands, the software will display what you are saying and also auto-complete what it thinks you want to say. These commands can also be typed for those who do not have voice recognition or do not want to use it. The lower portion of the screen shows the transmissions from each aircraft. If when issuing an instruction it doesn’t make sense, the aircraft will call back with an emphatic “Negative”. They also have personality, like asking for a more direct routing if you give them a crazy path to the runway. That is very real world!
