On December 24 each year air service providers across the globe prepare for a regular annual visitor to their airspace, someone to whom the normal rules of the air do not apply - Santa Claus.
His work has already commenced across in Australia where the local provider, Air Services Australia released the following air guidance for the flight of ‘SleighRider 1’....
According to Airservices this flight is its “top priority” on Christmas Eve and as its air traffic controllers see Santa’s sleigh on their radars they work carefully to ensure he avoids all other aircraft traffic. This means its controllers must give Santa special clearance and make sure any other aircraft near him on the night stay away from his unique flight path.
Santa’s flight will begin on Christmas Eve when he leaves the North Pole and travels down the International Date Line into the Southern Hemisphere. After visiting New Zealand he will enter Australian airspace near the coast of Tasmania.
Santa will then head north over mainland Australia with his sleigh zigzagging over every state and territory, making the most of Australia’s five different time zones, before finishing up over Western Australia. This is where he will say goodbye to the Australian air traffic controllers for another year and head north up to visit Papua New Guinea and Indonesia at across the rest of the globe.
In the UK, NATS has provided Routesonline with a little additional insight into what preparations are made to ensure this visitor makes a safe but on-time service to the millions of locations he touches down in the space of just a few hours.
According to NATS officials preparations for the night begin much earlier in the year, when representatives of Santa’s Workshop visit its control centres at Swanwick and Prestwick to discuss and plan the route for Christmas Eve.
Here’s the UK NOTAM for the flight...
Delivering presents to millions of children in just a few hours is complex work so the planning has to be meticulous, taking into account the delivery schedule and decreasing weight of the on board cargo versus the increasing weight of the pilot (all those mince pies soon add up). And remember everything is checked twice!
Then comes Christmas Eve, NATS controllers are in regular contact with the sleigh as it flies in and out of UK airspace. Such is the complexity of the operation, the easiest way to explain it is to show you - so NATS has taken real radar data and real radio transmissions from December 24 last year to create ‘Yuletide 24’.
I hope you enjoy it!
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