A control area (CTA) is an aviation term that describes a volume of controlled airspace that exists in the vicinity of an airport. It has a specified lower level and a specified upper level. It usually is situated on top of a control zone and provides protection to aircraft climbing out from the airport by joining the low-level control zone to the nearest airways. In the UK they are generally class A, D or E.
Control areas are particularly useful where there are busy airports located close together. In this case a single CTA will sit over all of the individual airports' CTRs. In larger-scale cases, this is known as a terminal manoeuvring area (TMA).
Famous quotes containing the words control and/or area:
“Who can control his fate?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines; but meet on what common ground remains,—if only that the sun shines, and the rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)