DCS ATC
Panel
An air traffic control panel for DCS World: tower strips, an approach scope, airport cards and charts. A hundred and twenty airports with frequencies, ILS, navaids and real runways, the active runway decided by the wind, the circuit drawn as a racetrack and a chart you can export as a kneeboard. Carrier control included, with PLAT and the deck seen from above.
What it is
The ATC Panel is the application’s control tower: it takes the telemetry of a running DCS mission and presents it the way a controller would see it. Tower strips split by flight state, an approach scope, and for every airport its card and its charts.
It lives in the same application as Mission Tracker, Live View, GCI Scope and Briefing Builder, and like them it is reached from gcidemo.
A hundred and twenty airports, and where the numbers come from
The dull, indispensable part is the dataset: 120 airport cards with ICAO code, four frequencies (UHF, VHF, HF, FM), ILS with its course, navaids, elevation and runway dimensions.
They were merged from the CombatWombat tables and corrected where the original sheet was wrong: Syria went from 33 fields to 53, that sheet’s scaled column was fixed, and Marj Ruhayyil’s position was off. Runway thresholds come from OurAirports’ real data rather than estimated geometry, and where DCS publishes its own geometry that is grafted in.
Why precision matters more here than elsewhere: an ATC that prints the wrong frequency is worse than no ATC at all, because the people flying trust it.
How the active runway is decided
Whoever is controlling does not pick it, the wind does. The card shows the briefing weather and derives the active runway from it, which is what a real tower would do. When the wind turns, the runway turns with it.
The scope, and the map under it
The scope is clipped to a circle, with a tile map underneath that can be switched between street, topographic and satellite, with adjustable opacity. Alignment to the DCS map is set once and stays saved, because a chart that does not line up with the terrain is worse than no chart.
Over it sits the racetrack circuit, drawn the way it is taught, so a glance says whether an aircraft is where it should be.
Flight states
The server-side engine keeps position history and derives each flight’s state from it, with hysteresis, because a state that flickers on every tick is noise rather than information:
PARKED · TAXI · ROLL · DEP · ARR · FINAL · LANDED · TRANSIT
Tower strips are grouped by state, which is how a controller actually keeps them on the desk.
Alerts, and why they can be closed
An automatic alert that was dismissed came back on the next tick, because the condition that raised it was still true: closing it achieved nothing and the panel became a place to escape from. Closing a case now silences that condition until it clears.
On the same logic, alerts appear only when the controller declares them, and fuel and damage reports plus a panel with the aircraft’s details have been added.
In the airport list, the fields with detected traffic come first, in bold and grouped: on a theatre with fifty airfields an alphabetical list does not say where something is happening.
The carrier
Naval control has a view of its own: PLAT, the deck seen from above with occupied spots, holding patterns and the tanker. Emergencies carry a procedure to follow, not just a red label.
The charts
Airport chart and circuit chart export as SVG, or as a PNG kneeboard to drop into the DCS Kneeboard folder, on the same principle as the Briefing Builder: whatever is needed in flight has to be able to get into the cockpit.
External charts, by contrast, are links rather than files. Jeppesen charts are under copyright and the real or community ones live on their own sites: the card carries the right links by ICAO prefix or by theatre, and an administrator can add more, validated and capped at twelve.
Access
Open at gcidemo.alessandrosimonitto.it/atc. The airport card editor is admin only.