Common traffic advisory frequency (CTAF), is the name given to the VHF radio frequency used for air-to-air communication at US, Canadian and Australian non-towered airports.
Many towered airports close their towers overnight, keeping the airport itself open for cargo operations and other activity. Pilots use the common frequency to coordinate their arrivals and departures safely, giving position reports and acknowledging other aircraft in the airfield traffic pattern.
In many locations, smaller airports use pilot-controlled lighting systems when it is uneconomical or inconvenient to have automated systems or staff to turn on the taxiway and runway lights. In Canada, the lighting system is accessed through an aircraft radio control of aerodrome lighting (ARCAL) frequency which is often shared with the CTAF.
Two common CTAF allocations are UNICOM, a licensed non-government base station that provides air-to-ground communications (and vice versa) and may also serve as a CTAF when in operation, and MULTICOM, a frequency allocation (without a physical base station) that is reserved as a CTAF for airports without other facilities.
Read more about Common Traffic Advisory Frequency: Australia, US/world
Famous quotes containing the words common, traffic, advisory and/or frequency:
“To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law; where no Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in war the two Cardinal virtues.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“To treat a “big” subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening’s traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“At the heart of the educational process lies the child. No advances in policy, no acquisition of new equipment have their desired effect unless they are in harmony with the child, unless they are fundamentally acceptable to him.”
—Central Advisory Council for Education. Children and Their Primary Schools (Plowden Report)
“One is apt to be discouraged by the frequency with which Mr. Hardy has persuaded himself that a macabre subject is a poem in itself; that, if there be enough of death and the tomb in one’s theme, it needs no translation into art, the bold statement of it being sufficient.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)