Blog  ·  3 JuneTake a peek inside the Schiphol Tower

You won't find Rapunzel up in the Schiphol Tower. You will find air traffic controllers who work for Air Traffic Control the Netherlands (LVNL) and our own apron controllers, gate planners and bus controllers. Together they ensure that all aircraft can safely depart and land at our airport, that there is a place for them at the gate, and – if that's not the case – that a bus can take travellers to the terminal safely and quickly.  

The tower looks a bit like a large ice cream with a scoop of whipped cream on top. That 'scoop', which was recently replaced, is the ground radar. Air traffic control uses it to pick up signals from aircraft that are driving on the ground. The employees who keep a close eye on our airport work inside the ‘ice cream’, the part with the large windows underneath. 

At the very top you will find the air traffic controllers. They ensure that all aircraft can arrive and depart one after the other in an organised manner. An air traffic controller tells the pilots their direction, speed and altitude, and which runway they should take off from or land on at Schiphol. They are the pilot's ears and eyes on the ground. That is why air traffic controllers are also in the tower, so that they can see everything at the airport! 

All aircraft arriving at Schiphol park at a gate. That is where you can get off the plane. A gate planner makes a schedule detailing where each aircraft must park the next day. That is quite a puzzle! A large aircraft can only park at special gates where there is room for larger aircraft, for example. And when there's snow, some parking spaces for aircraft will already be occupied for snow storage. 

If there's no space at the gate, we park ‘remote’, as we call it at Schiphol, and the passengers are taken from the apron to the terminal by bus. Bus control is responsible for managing these buses. They work closely with gate planning, because they have a lot of influence regarding where and when buses should be deployed. 

On the day itself, these schedules sometimes change. For example, if a plane arrives late at Schiphol, it cannot park at the designated gate as it will already be occupied by the following one. The gate planner then immediately looks for a new parking space for the plane. In this way, the gate planners in the tower ensure that every plane can park somewhere. 

A lot of planes arrive at Schiphol. When it's busy in the summer, there are about 1,600 of them each day! And we don't have an infinite number of gates at our disposal. A plane that arrives early in the morning but is due to leave at the end of the afternoon cannot stay at the gate all that time. To free up gates, we tow planes to another location at Schiphol where they can park in the meantime. 

Towing those planes is the task of our apron controllers. From the tower, they can see the best route the plane can take to the new parking spot. It's a bit like a navigation system in a car; it looks for the shortest route with the least traffic. And a navigation system also tells you how to get to your destination. Our apron controllers do that too, but for planes. Because with all those landing and departing aircraft driving around at Schiphol, the best route is different every time.