Inside Vancouver
How to Land a Plane at YVR
By Timothy Taylor published Apr 15, 2009
Every minute, a plane lands at or takes off from the airport.
Welcome to the arcane world of radio vectors, a hidden network of
computer waypoints, and a windowless control room in Surrey
You're coming into YVR from Toronto. It’s been a long flight but it’s on schedule. Smooth ride, decent movie. But then the plane thumps and rattles onto the runway and you’re thinking: man, where’d this rookie learn to fly?
It’s common, this reaction. Not universal, though. In Italy, they applaud every landing provided the head count is the same as on departure. But in North America, assuming the wing wasn’t on fire during descent, either a pilot greases the touchdown or we all roll our eyes and think of how we once flew a 737 clean under the Golden Gate Bridge in MS Flight Simulator before (admittedly) crashing into the Palace of Fine Arts.
It’s ironic, given we basically haven’t any clue what’s going on during landing outside that millisecond the gear makes contact. The fact is, a pilot has to get a whole lot right before the privilege of bumping onto the runway is even available.
John Morris, president of Blackcomb Aviation, runs a fleet of jet and turboprop aircraft and helicopters into Vancouver. He explains that landing at YVR starts 40 minutes and 100 nautical miles back. At “top of descent,” the pilot checks local weather, visibility, ceiling, and winds. Here, the aircraft is directed onto a Standard Terminal Arrival Route (STAR), a sequence of waypoints and tracks that takes the plane into the airport area. STARs are programmed into the flight computer, but pilots also keep a book of them for doing it the old-fashioned way if necessary.
PROJECT RUNWAY How to Land a Plane in Four Easy Steps
STARs into the YVR area have names like GRIZZ3 and SHARK7, and an aircraft is assigned one based on the direction it’s arriving from. The assignment comes not from the YVR tower but from Vancouver Approach Control, a windowless room in a building in Surrey where up to 40 staff, including air-traffic controllers and support personnel, coordinate flights arriving at and departing from the YVR area. The idea is to deliver all incoming flights in a nicely spaced fashion to the airport flight pattern, the last set of tracks around the airport that planes follow before landing.
